Government, like any other organism, refuses to acquiesce in its own extinction. This refusal, of course, involves the resistance to any effort… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
The saddest life is that of a political aspirant under democracy. His failure is ignominious and his success is disgraceful. — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
What is any political campaign save a concerted effort to turn out a set of politicians who are admittedly bad and put… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
In the United States...politics is purged of all menace, all sinister quality, all genuine significance, and stuffed with such gorgeous humors, such… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
People do not expect to find chastity in a whorehouse. Why, then, do they expect to find honesty and humanity in government,… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
Government, in its very essence, is opposed to all increase in knowledge. Its tendency is always towards permanence and against change...[T]he progress… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
No politician is ever benefited by saving money; it is spending it that makes him. — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
All government is, in its essence, organized exploitation, and in virtually all of its existing forms it is the implacable enemy of… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
Good government is that which delivers the citizen from being done out of his life and property too arbitrarily and violently-one that… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
A professional politician is a professionally dishonorable man. In order to get anywhere near high office he has to make so many… — 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
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