H. L. Mencken Quotes and Sayings - Page 1

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“Love is like war: easy to begin but very hard to stop.”
-- H. L. Mencken

#Love #Anniversary #War
“The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule.”
-- H. L. Mencken

#Peace #Freedom #War
“Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under.”
-- H. L. Mencken

#Freedom #Integrity #Men
“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.”
-- H. L. Mencken

#Freedom #Honesty #Hate
“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.”
-- H. L. Mencken

#Freedom #Safety #Political
“It [the State] has taken on a vast mass of new duties and responsibilities; it has spread out its powers until they penetrate to every act of the citizen, however secret; it has begun to throw around its operations the high dignity and impeccability of a State religion; its agents become a separate and superior caste, with authority to bind and loose, and their thumbs in every pot. But it still remains, as it was in the beginning, the common enemy of all well-disposed, industrious and decent men.”
-- H. L. Mencken

#Taken #Responsibility #Men
“The most dangerous man to any government is the man who is able to think things out... without regard to the prevailing superstitions and taboos. Almost inevitably he comes to the conclusion that the government he lives under is dishonest, insane, intolerable.”
-- H. L. Mencken

#Men #Thinking #Insane
“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. Mencken

#Learning #Enlightenment #Safe
“No article of faith is proof against the disintegrating effects of increasing information; one might almost describe the acquirement of knowledge as a process of disillusion.”
-- H. L. Mencken

#Might #Information #Proof
“There is, it appears, a conspiracy of scientists afoot. Their purpose is to break down religion, propagate immorality, and so reduce mankind to the level of brutes. They are the sworn and sinister agents of Beelzebub, who yearns to conquer the world, and has his eye especially upon Tennessee.]”
-- H. L. Mencken

#Eye #Tennessee #Purpose
“A good politician is quite as unthinkable as an honest burglar.”
-- H. L. Mencken

#Freedom #Democracy #Politics
“Puritanism. The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.”
-- H. L. Mencken

#God #Being Happy #Cynical
“If a politician found he had cannibals among his constituents, he would promise them missionaries for dinner.”
-- H. L. Mencken

#Political #Promise #Politics
“The ideal Government of all reflective men, from Aristotle onward, is one which lets the individual alone - one which barely escapes being no government at all.”
-- H. L. Mencken

#Men #Government #Liberty
“In the United States, doing good has come to be, like patriotism, a favorite device of persons with something to sell.”
-- H. L. Mencken

#Patriotism #United States #Doing Good
“Love is the triumph of imagination over intelligence.”
-- H. L. Mencken

#Love #Funny #Marriage
“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

#Peace #Freedom #War
“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

#Heart #White #Land
“Civilization, in fact, grows more maudlin and hysterical; especially under democracy it tends to degenerate into a mere combat of crazes; the whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary. Wars are no longer waged by the will of superior men, capable of judging dispassionately and intelligently the causes behind them and the effects flowing out of them. The are now begun by first throwing a mob into a panic; they are ended only when it has spent its ferine fury.”
-- H. L. Mencken

#War #Men #Civilization
“Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance.”
-- H. L. Mencken

#Freedom #Ignorance #Liberty
“For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.”
-- H. L. Mencken

#Funny Inspirational #Freedom #Business
“It is not materialism that is the chief curse of the world, as pastors teach, but idealism. Men get into trouble by taking their visions and hallucinations too seriously.”
-- H. L. Mencken

#Men #Vision #Hallucinations
“If women believed in their husbands they would be a good deal happier and also a good deal more foolish.”
-- H. L. Mencken

#Husband #Stupid #Would Be
“In the duel of sex woman fights from a dreadnought and man from an open raft.”
-- H. L. Mencken

#Sex #Fighting #Men
“Morality is doing what is right, no matter what you are told. Religion is doing what you are told, no matter what is right.”
-- H. L. Mencken

#Atheism #Matter #Morality
“I believe that it is better to tell the truth than a lie. I believe it is better to be free than to be a slave. And I believe it is better to know than to be ignorant.”
-- H. L. Mencken

#Inspirational #Nature #Truth
“Under democracy one party always devotes its chief energies to trying to prove that the other party is unfit to rule—and both commonly succeed, and are right.”
-- H. L. Mencken

#Freedom #War #Party
“The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one's time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all.”
-- H. L. Mencken

#Time #Freedom #Fighting
“Genius: the ability to prolong one's childhood.”
-- H. L. Mencken

#Childhood #Genius #Ability
“Human progress is furthered, not by conformity, but by aberration.”
-- H. L. Mencken

#Progress #Aberration #Conformity

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