The net effect of Clarence Darrow's great speech yesterday seemed to be precisely the same as if he had bawled it up… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
No professional politician is ever actually in favor of public economy. It is his implacable enemy, and he knows it. All professional… — 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 theory behind representative government is that superior men-or at least men not inferior to the average in ability and integrity-are chosen… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
Has the art of politics no apparent utility? Does it appear to be unqualifiedly ratty, raffish, sordid, obscene, and low down, andits… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
The government consists of a gang of men exactly like you and me. They have, taking one with another, no special talent… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
A politician is an animal which can sit on a fence and yet keep both ears to the ground. — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
[Government's] great contribution to human wisdom...is the discovery that the taxpayer has more than one pocket. — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
Our whole practical government is grounded in mob psychology and the Boobus Americanus will follow any command that promises to make him… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
There are some politicians who, if their constituents were cannibals, would promise them missionaries in every pot. — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
A great nation is any mob of people which produces at least one honest man a century. — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
Socialist: A man suffering from an overwhelming conviction to believe what is not true. — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
Politics, under a democracy, reduces itself to a mere struggle for office by flatterers of the proletariat; even when a superior man… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
All [zoos] actually offer to the public in return for the taxes spent upon them is a form of idle and witless… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
I believe that all government is evil, and that trying to improve it is largely a waste of time. — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
The only way that a government can provide for jobs for all citizens is by deciding what every man should do. — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
As for me, my literary theory, like my politics, is based chiefly upon one main idea, to wit, the idea of freedom.… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
If experience teaches us anything at all, it teaches us this: that a good politician, under democracy, is quite as unthinkable as… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
Looking for an honest politician is like looking for an ethical burglar. — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
A national political campaign is better than the best circus ever heard of, with a mass baptism and a couple of hangings… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
A politician normally prospers under democracy in proportion ... as he excels in the invention of imaginary perils and imaginary defenses against them. — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
The kind of man who demands that government enforce his ideas is always the kind whose ideas are idiotic. — 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
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