The aim of public education is not to spread enlightenment at all; it is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed a standard citizenry, to put down dissent and originality.
H. L. MENCKENThe aim of public education is not to spread enlightenment at all; it is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed a standard citizenry, to put down dissent and originality.
More H. L. Mencken Quotes
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Equality before the law is probably forever unattainable. It is a noble ideal, but it can never be realized, for what men value in this world is not rights but privileges.
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A professional politician is a professionally dishonorable man. In order to get anywhere near high office he has to make so many compromises and submit to so many humiliations that he becomes indistinguishable from a streetwalker.
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Sometimes the idiots outvote the sensible people.
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Change is not progress.
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The central belief of every moron is that he is the victim of a mysterious conspiracy against his common rights and true deserts.
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A cynic is a man who, when he smells flowers, looks around for a coffin.
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Every election is a sort of advance auction sale of stolen goods.
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It is even harder for the average ape to believe that he has descended from man.
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The only good bureaucrat is one with a pistol at his head. Put it in his hand and it’s good-bye to the Bill of Rights.
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A church is a place in which gentlemen who have never been to Heaven brag about it to persons who will never get there.
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Morality is doing what is right, no matter what you are told. Religion is doing what you are told, no matter what is right.
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The men the American people admire most extravagantly are the most daring liars; the men they detest most violently are those who try to tell them the truth.
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A man may be a fool and not know it, but not if he is married.
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The only thing wrong with Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address was that it was the South, not the North, that was fighting for a government of the people, by the people and for the people.
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An idealist is one who, on noticing that roses smell better than a cabbage, concludes that it will also make better soup.
H. L. MENCKEN