55 H L Mencken Quotes For Success In Life

Henry Louis Mencken was an American journalist, essayist, satirist, cultural critic, and scholar of American English. He commented widely on the social scene, literature, music, prominent politicians, and contemporary movements. These H L Mencken Quotes on education, relation, love, etc will inspire you.

Best H L Mencken Quotes

1. “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
2. “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
3. “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

4. “The demagogue is one who preaches doctrines he knows to be untrue to men he knows to be idiots.” ~ H. L. Mencken

5. “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. Their principal device to that end is to search out groups who pant and pine for something they can’t get and to promise to give it to them. Nine times out of ten that promise is worth nothing. The tenth time is made good by looting A to satisfy B. In other words, the government is a broker in pillage, and every election is sort of an advance auction sale of stolen goods.” ~ H. L. Mencken
6. “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 Quotes
7. “The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule.” ~ H. L. Mencken
8. “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

9. “Socialist: A man suffering from an overwhelming conviction to believe what is not true.” ~ H. L. Mencken

10. “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
11. “It is the classic fallacy of our time that a moron run through a university and decorated with a Ph.D. will their
12. “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

13. “Every normal man must be tempted, at times, to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats.” ~ H. L. Mencken

14. “The plain fact is that education is itself a form of propaganda – a deliberate scheme to outfit the pupil, not with the capacity to weigh ideas, but with a simple appetite for gulping ideas ready-made. The aim is to make ‘good’ citizens, which is to say, docile and uninquisitive citizens.” ~ H. L. Mencken
15. “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
16. “When somebody says it’s not about the money, it’s about the money.” ~ H. L. Mencken
17. “If a politician found he had cannibals among his constituents, he would promise them missionaries for dinner.” ~ H. L. Mencken
18. “In this world of sin and sorrow there is always something to be thankful for; as for me, I rejoice that I am not a Republican.” ~ H. L. Mencken

19. “A man may be a fool and not know it, but not if he is married.” ~ H. L. Mencken

20. “When a candidate for public office faces the voters he does not face men of sense; he faces a mob of men whose chief distinguishing mark is the fact that they are quite incapable of weighing ideas, or even of comprehending any save the most elemental – men whose whole thinking is done in terms of emotion, and whose dominant emotion is dread of what they cannot understand. So confronted, the candidate must either bark with the pack or be lost… All the odds are on the man who is, intrinsically, the most devious and mediocre.” ~ H. L. Mencken
21. “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
22. “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.” ~ H. L. Mencken
23. “The notion that a radical is one who hates his country is naïve and usually idiotic. He is, more likely, one who likes his country more than the rest of us, and is thus more disturbed than the rest of us when he sees it debauched. He is not a bad citizen turning to crime; he is a good citizen driven to despair.” ~ H. L. Mencken

24. “Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance.” ~ H. L. Mencken

25. “Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under.” ~ H. L. Mencken
26. “The Jews could be put down very plausibly as the most unpleasant race ever heard of. As commonly encountered they lack any of the qualities that mark the civilized man: courage, dignity, incorruptibility, ease, confidence. They have vanity without pride, voluptuousness without taste, and learning without wisdom. Their fortitude, such as it is, is wasted upon puerile objects, and their charity is mainly a form of display.” ~ H. L. Mencken
27. “A cynic is a man who, when he smells flowers, looks around for a coffin.” ~ H. L. Mencken
28. “There’s really no point in voting. If it made any difference, it would probably be illegal.” ~ H. L. Mencken

29. “Puritanism. The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, maybe happy.”

30. “Liberty is of small value to the lower third of humanity. They greatly prefer security, which means protection by some class above them. They are always in favor of despots who promise to feed them. The only liberty an inferior man really cherishes is the liberty to quit work, stretch out in the sun, and scratch himself.” ~ H. L. Mencken
31. “Misogynist: A man who hates women as much as women hate one another.” ~ H. L. Mencken
32. “I give you Chicago. It is not London and Harvard. It is not Paris and buttermilk. It is American in every chilling and sparerib. It is alive from snout to tail.” ~ H. L. Mencken
33. “Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.” ~ H. L. Mencken
34. “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.” ~ H. L. Mencken
35. “Every election is a sort of advance auction sale of stolen goods.” ~ H. L. Mencken
36. “The State doesn’t just want you to obey, it wants to make you WANT to obey.” ~ H. L. Mencken
37. “A church is a place in which gentlemen who have never been to Heaven brag about it to persons who will never get there.” ~ H. L. Mencken
38. “A judge is a law student who marks his own examination papers.” ~ H. L. Mencken

39. “You can’t do anything about the length of your life, but you can do something about its width and depth.” ~ H. L. Mencken

40. “Moral certainty is always a sign of cultural inferiority. The more uncivilized the man, the surer he is that he knows precisely what is right and what is wrong. All human progress, even in morals, has been the work of men who have doubted the current moral values, not of men who have whooped them up and tried to enforce them. The truly civilized man is always skeptical and tolerant.” ~ H L Mencken Quotes
41. “The most dangerous man to any government is the man who is able to think things out for himself.” ~ H. L. Mencken

42. “Most people want security in this world, not liberty.” ~ H. L. Mencken

43. “My belief in free speech is so profound that I am seldom tempted to deny it to the other fellow. Nor do I make an effort to differentiate between the other fellow right and that other fellow wrong, for I am convinced that free speech is worth nothing unless it includes a full franchise to be foolish and even…malicious.” ~ H. L. Mencken
44. “School days, I believe, are the unhappiest in the whole span of human existence. They are full of dull, unintelligible tasks, new and unpleasant ordinances, brutal violations of common sense, and common decency. It doesn’t take a reasonably bright boy long to discover that most of what is rammed into him is nonsense and that no one really cares very much whether he learns it or not.” ~ H. L. Mencken
45. “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
46. “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

47. “Democracy is also a form of worship. It is the worship of Jackals by Jackasses.” – H. L. Mencken

48. “For every problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.” ~ H. L. Mencken
49. “The chief difference between free capitalism and State socialism seems to be this: that under the former a man pursues his own advantage openly, frankly and honestly, whereas under the latter he does so hypocritically and under false pretenses.” ~ H. L. Mencken
50. “Sunday is a day given over by Americans to wishing that themselves were dead and in Heaven and that their neighbors were dead and in Hell.” ~ H L Mencken Quotes
51. “Evangelical Christianity, as everyone knows, is founded upon hate, as the Christianity of Christ was founded upon love.” ~ H. L. Mencken
52. “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
53. “No professional politician is ever actually in favor of public economy. It is his implacable enemy, and he knows it. All professional politicians are dedicated wholeheartedly to waste and corruption. They are the enemies of every decent man.” ~ H. L. Mencken
54. “The common argument that crime is caused by poverty is a kind of slander on the poor.” ~ H. L. Mencken
55. “Freedom of the press is limited to those who own one.” ~ H. L. Mencken

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