H.L. Mencken Quotes President
The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.
A good politician is quite as unthinkable as an honest burglar.
Giving every man a vote has no more made men wise and free than Christianity has made them good.
A government that robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on the support of Paul.
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.
The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule.
No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public.
The most dangerous man, to any government, is the man who is able to think things out for himself, without regard to the prevailing superstitions and taboos.
Every election is a sort of advance auction sale of stolen goods.
There is always a well-known solution to every human problemneat, plausible, and wrong.
Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard.
The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.
There are men who believe in a government of laws, not of men; but they are few.
I believe that liberty is the only genuinely valuable thing that men have invented, at least in the field of government, in a thousand years.
The only liberty an inferior man really cherishes is the liberty to quit work, stretch out in the sun, and scratch himself.
The one permanent emotion of the inferior man is fear; fear of the unknown, the complex, the inexplicable.
The only way to reconcile oneself to death is to forget about it.
Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance.
It is the fundamental theory of all the more recent American law that the average citizen is half-witted, and hence not to be trusted to either his own devices or his own thoughts.
The demagogue is one who preaches doctrines he knows to be untrue to men he knows to be idiots.
It is not materialism that is the chief curse of the world, as pastors teach, but idealism.
Injustice is relatively easy to bear; what stings is justice.
The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule.
Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under.
In America, it is sport that is the opiate of the masses.
As a democracy, the United States must let every man speak his mind.
An idealist is a person who helps other people to be prosperous.
Democracy is the art of running the circus from the monkey cage.
Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance.
Every election is a sort of advance auction sale of stolen goods.
If a politician found he had cannibals among his constituents, he would promise them missionaries for dinner.
The liberation of the human mind has never been furthered by dunderheads.
The most dangerous man to any government is the man who is able to think things out for himself.
Unquestionably, there is progress. The average American now pays out twice as much in taxes as he formerly got in wages.
It is the theory of all modern civilized governments that they protect and foster the liberty of the citizen; it is the practice of all of them to limit its exercise, and sometimes very narrowly.
Be silent and safesilence never betrays you.
An idealist is one who, on noticing that a rose smells better than a cabbage, concludes that it will also make better soup.
Under democracy, one party always devotes its chief energies to trying to prove that the other party is unfit to ruleand both commonly succeed, and are right.
The older I grow, the more I distrust the familiar doctrine that age brings wisdom.
To the man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
Nobody ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public.
It is inaccurate to say that I hate everything. I am strongly in favor of common sense, common honesty, and common decency. This makes me forever ineligible for public office.
The man who is admired for the ingenuity of his larceny is almost always rediscovering some earlier form of fraud.
Nobody ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the masses.
The average woman, considered as the mere embodiment of her species, is a somewhat frightful object.
The one permanent emotion of the inferior man is fearfear of the unknown, the complex, the inexplicable. What he wants above everything else is safety.
I believe in only one thing: liberty; but I do not believe in liberty enough to want to force it upon anyone.
A good politician is quite as unthinkable as an honest burglar.
The government consists of a gang of men exactly like you and me. They have, taking one with another, no special talent for the business of government; they have only a talent for getting and holding office.
Love is a snowmobile racing across the tundra and then suddenly it flips over, pinning you underneath. At night, the ice weasels come.