« All Politics Quotes · H. L. Mencken's Page
Politics Quotes by H. L. Mencken
- A man of active and resilient mind outwears his friendships just as certainly as he outwears his love affairs, his politics and his epistemology.
- In the United States...politics is purged of all menace, all sinister quality, all genuine significance, and stuffed with such gorgeous humors, such inordinate farce that…
- A government at bottom is nothing more than a group of men, and as a practical matter most of them are inferior men. ... Yet…
- Socialist: A man suffering from an overwhelming conviction to believe what is not true.
- If there had been any formidable body of cannibals in the country, Harry Truman would have promised to provide them with free missionaries fattened at…
- Nothing is so abject and pathetic as a politician who has lost his job, save only a retired stud-horse.
- Politics, as hopeful men practise it in the world, consists mainly of the delusion that a change in form is a change in substance.
- The state remains, as it was in the beginning, the common enemy of all well-disposed, industrious and decent men.
- The art of politics, under democracy, is simply the art of ringing it. Two branches reveal themselves. There is the art of the demagogue, and…
- Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance.
- Every election is a sort of advance auction sale of stolen goods.
- 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…
- 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…
- Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.
- Nobody ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public.
- A good politician is quite as unthinkable as an honest burglar.
- A national political campaign is better than the best circus ever heard of, with a mass baptism and a couple of hangings thrown in.
- Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under.
- Whenever you hear a man speak of his love for his country, it is a sign that he expects to be paid for it.
- 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…
- 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…
- 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…
- 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…
- If experience teaches us anything at all, it teaches us this: that a good politician, under democracy, is quite as unthinkable as an honest burglar.
More Politics Quotes
- The most radical revolutionary will become a conservative the day after the revolution. — Hannah Arendt
- No cause is left but the most ancient of all, the one, in fact, that from the beginning of our history has… — Hannah Arendt
- Wherever the relevance of speech is at stake, matters become political by definition, for speech is what makes man a political being. — Hannah Arendt
- Under every stone lurks a politician. — Aristophanes
- Democracy is when the indigent, and not the men of property, are the rulers. — Aristotle
- In a democracy the poor will have more power than the rich, because there are more of them, and the will of… — Aristotle
- A tyrant must put on the appearance of uncommon devotion to religion. Subjects are less apprehensive of illegal treatment from a ruler… — Aristotle
- Both oligarch and tyrant mistrust the people, and therefore deprive them of their arms. — Aristotle
- Politicians also have no leisure, because they are always aiming at something beyond political life itself, power and glory, or happiness. — Aristotle
- Republics decline into democracies and democracies degenerate into despotisms. — Aristotle
- Man is by nature a political animal. — Aristotle
- Therefore, the good of man must be the end of the science of politics. — Aristotle