The aim of New Deals is to exterminate the class of creditors and thrust all men into that of debtors. It is… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
The State is not force alone. It depends upon the credulity of man quite as much as upon his docility. Its aim… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
Here is one of the fundamental defects of American fiction--perhaps the one character that sets it off sharply from all other known… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
The aim of public education is not to spread enlightenment at all; it is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
One of the main purposes of laws in a democratic society is to put burdens upon intelligence and reduce it to impotence.… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
If the American people really tire of democracy and want to make a trial of Fascism, I shall be the last person… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
Hygiene is the corruption of medicine by morality. It is impossible to find a hygienist who does not debase his theory of… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
The true aim of medicine is not to make men virtuous; it is to safeguard and rescue them from the consequences of… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
[The] erroneous assumption is to the effect that the aim of public education is to fill the young of the species with… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
Governments, whatever their pretensions otherwise, try to preserve themselves by holding the individual down ... Government itself, indeed, may be reasonably defined… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
The highfalutin aims of democracy, whether real or imaginary, are always assumed to be identical with its achievements. This, of course, is… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
The idea that the sole aim of punishment is to prevent crime is obviously grounded upon the theory that crime can be… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
The aim of poetry, it appears, is to fill the mind with lofty thoughts--not to give it joy, but to give it… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
Here is tragedy - and here is America. For the curse of the country, as well of all democracies, is precisely the… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
A bad artist almost always tries to conceal his incompetence by whooping up a new formula. — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
By profession a biologist, [Thomas Henry Huxley] covered in fact the whole field of the exact sciences, and then bulged through its four fences.… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
So few men are really worth knowing, that it seems a shameful waste to let an anthropoid prejudice stand in the way of free… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
Man's objection to love is that it dies hard; woman's, that when it is dead, it stays dead. — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
For it is an absurdity to call a country civilized in which a decent and industrious man, laboriously mastering a trade which is valuble… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
Women have simple tastes. They get pleasure out of the conversation of children in arms and men in love. — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
The critic, to interpret his artist, even to understand his artist, must be able to get into the mind of his artist; he must… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
There is, in fact, nothing about religious opinions that entitles them to any more respect than other opinions get. On the contrary, they tend… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
Liberty ... was a two-headed boon. There was first, the liberty of the people as a whole to determine the forms of their own… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image