H. L. Mencken Quotes

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, government is a broker in pillage, and every election is sort of an advance auction sale of stolen goods.

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.

Love is the triumph of imagination over intelligence.

Immorality: the morality of those who are having a better time.

A government at bottom is nothing more than a group of men, and as a practical matter most of them are inferior men. … Yet these nonentities, by the intellectual laziness of men in general … are generally obeyed as a matter of duty (and) assumed to have a kind of wisdom that is superior to ordinary wisdom.

A man full of faith is simply one who has lost the capacity for clear and realistic thought.

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.

Human progress is furthered, not by conformity, but by aberration.

The best teacher is not the one who knows most but the one who is most capable of reducing knowledge to that simple compound of the obvious and wonderful.

The natural tendency of every government is to grow steadily worse-that is, to grow more satisfactory to those who constitute it and less satisfactory to those who support it.

Politics, as hopeful men practise it in the world, consists mainly of the delusion that a change in form is a change in substance.

A newspaper is a device for making the ignorant more ignorant and the crazy crazier.