"In the United States, doing good has come to be, like patriotism, a favorite device of persons with something to sell."
—H.L. Mencken (1880-1956)
"Nobody ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public."
– H.L. Mencken (1880-1956)
"The chief value of money lies in the fact that one lives in a world in which it is overestimated."
– H.L. Mencken (1880-1956)
"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace in a continual state of alarm (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing them with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary."
– H.L. Mencken (1880-1956)
"Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under."
– H.L. Mencken (1880-1956)
"For centuries, theologians have been explaining the unknowable in terms of the-not-worth-knowing."
– H.L. Mencken (1880-1956)
"It is now quite lawful for a Catholic woman to avoid pregnancy by a resort to mathematics, though she is still forbidden to resort to physics or chemistry."
– H.L. Mencken (1880-1956)
"Say what you will about the Ten Commandments, you must always come back to the pleasant fact that there are only ten of them."
– H.L. Mencken (1880-1956)
“The older I grow, the more I distrust the familiar doctrine that age brings wisdom.”
― H.L. Mencken (1880-1956)
“Every normal man must be tempted, at times, to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats.”
― H.L. Mencken (1880-1956)
“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. Almost inevitably he comes to the conclusion that the government he lives under is dishonest, insane, and intolerable...”
― H.L. Mencken (1880-1956)
“In the present case it is a little inaccurate to say I hate everything. I am strongly in favor of common sense, common honesty and common decency. This makes me forever ineligible to any public office of trust or profit in the Republic. But I do not repine, for I am a subject of it only by force of arms.”
― H.L. Mencken (1880-1956)
“As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.”
― H.L. Mencken (1880-1956)
“Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance. No one in this world, so far as I know—and I have researched the records for years, and employed agents to help me—has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people. Nor has anyone ever lost public office thereby.”
― H.L. Mencken (1880-1956)
“A good politician is quite as unthinkable as an honest burglar.”
― H.L. Mencken (1880-1956)
“The best teacher is not the one who knows most but the one who is most capable of reducing knowledge to that simple compound of the obvious and wonderful.”
― H.L. Mencken (1880-1956)
“You can't do anything about the length of your life, but you can do something about its width and depth.”
― H.L. Mencken (1880-1956)
“I am suspicious of all the things that the average people believes.”
― H.L. Mencken (1880-1956)
“Puritanism: The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.”
― H.L. Mencken (1880-1956)
“On one issue, at least, men and women agree: they both distrust women.”
― H.L. Mencken (1880-1956)
“Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard.”
― H.L. Mencken (1880-1956)
“Giving every man a vote has no more made men wise and free than Christianity has made them good.”
― H.L. Mencken (1880-1956)
"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 level, to breed a srandard citizenry, to put down dissent and originality".
—H.L. Mencken (1880-1956)
"For every complex problem there is a solution that is concise, clear, simple, and wrong."
—H.L. Mencken (1880-1956)
"Every election is a sort of advance auction of stolen goods."
—H.L. Mencken (1880-1956)
"All government is, in its essence, organized exploitation, and in virtually all of its existing forms it is the implacable enemy of every industrious and well-disposed man."
—H.L. Mencken (1880-1956)
"I am strongly in favor of common sense, common honesty, and common decency. This makes me forever ineligible for public office."
—H.L. Mencken (1880-1956)
"I believe in only one thing: liberty; but I do not believe in liberty enough to want to force it upon anyone."
—H.L. Mencken (1880-1956)
"The most dangerous man to any government is the man who is able to think things out for himself...Almost inevitably, he comes to the conclusion that the government he lives under is dishonest, insane and intolerable."
—H.L. Mencken (1880-1956)
"The natural tendency of every government is to grow steadily worse—that is, to grow more satisfactory to those who constitute it and less satisfactory to those who support it."
—H.L. Mencken (1880-1956)
"Government is actually the worst failure of civilized man. There has never been a really good one, and even those that are most tolerable are arbitrary, criminal, grasping, and unintelligent."
—H.L. Mencken (1880-1956)
"The true bureaucrat is a man of really remarkable talents…an almost infinite capacity for forming complicated and unworkable rules."
—H.L. Mencken (1880-1956)
"It is the invariable habit of bureaucracies, at all times and everywhere, to assume...that every citizen is a criminal. Their one apparent purpose, pursued with a relentless and furious diligence, is to convert the assumption into a fact. They hunt endlessly for proofs, and, when proofs are lacking, for mere suspicions."
—H.L. Mencken (1880-1956)
"The kind of man who wants the government to adopt and enforce his ideas is always the kind of man whose ideas are idiotic."
—H.L. Mencken (1880-1956)
"If a politician found he had cannibals among his constituents, he would promise them missionaries for dinner."
—H.L. Mencken (1880-1956)
"Never believe anything you hear, and only half of what you see."
—H.L. Mencken (1880-1956)
“On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron."
—H.L. Mencken (1880-1956)
“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.”
—H.L. Mencken (1880-1956)
”People do not expect to find chastity in a whorehouse. Why, then, do they expect to find honesty and humanity in government, a congeries of institutions whose modus operandi consists of lying, cheating, stealing, and if need be, murdering those who resist?”
– H.L. Mencken (1880-1956)