"Most people want security in this world, not liberty."
"A good politician is quite as unthinkable as an honest burglar."
"Every election is a sort of advance auction sale of stolen goods."
"Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under."
"The penalty for laughing in a courtroom is six months in jail; if it were not for this penalty, the jury would never hear the evidence."
"A judge is a law student who marks his own examination papers."
"I believe in only one thing: liberty; but I do not believe in liberty enough to want to force it upon anyone."
"A national political campaign is better than the best circus ever heard of, with a mass baptism and a couple of hangings thrown in."
"Communism, like any other revealed religion, is largely made up of prophecies."
"Democracy is also a form of worship. It is the worship of Jackals by Jackasses."
"I believe that all government is evil, and that trying to improve it is largely a waste of time."
"Nobody ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public."
"A politician is an animal which can sit on a fence and yet keep both ears to the ground."
"Democracy is only a dream: it should be put in the same category as Arcadia, Santa Claus, and Heaven."
"War will never cease until babies begin to come into the world with larger cerebrums and smaller adrenal glands."
"Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance."
"A newspaper is a device for making the ignorant more ignorant and the crazy crazier."
"The urge to save humanity is almost always only a false-face for the urge to rule it."
"It doesn't take a majority to make a rebellion; it takes only a few determined leaders and a sound cause."
"If a politician found he had cannibals among his constituents, he would promise them missionaries for dinner."
"Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard."
"The kind of man who wants the government to adopt and enforce his ideas is always the kind of man whose ideas are idiotic."
"I believe that it is better to tell the truth than a lie. I believe it is better to be free than to be a slave. And I believe it is better to know than to be ignorant."
"We must respect the other fellow's religion, but only in the sense and to the extent that we respect his theory that his wife is beautiful and his children smart."
"Every normal man must be tempted, at times, to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats."
"Equality before the law is probably forever unattainable. It is a noble ideal, but it can never be realized, for what men value in this world is not rights but privileges."
"It is inaccurate to say that I hate everything. I am strongly in favor of common sense, common honesty, and common decency. This makes me forever ineligible for public office."
"The men the American people admire most extravagantly are the most daring liars; the men they detest most violently are those who try to tell them the truth."
"As democracy is perfected, the office of President represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. 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."
"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary."
"The fact is that the average man's love of liberty is nine-tenths imaginary, exactly like his love of sense, justice and truth. He is not actually happy when free; he is uncomfortable, a bit alarmed, and intolerably lonely."
"When a new source of taxation is found it never means, in practice, that the old source is abandoned. It merely means that the politicians have two ways of milking the taxpayer where they had one before."
"The most dangerous man to any government is the man who is able to think things out for himself, without regard to the prevailing superstitions and taboos. Almost inevitably he comes to the conclusion that the government he lives under is dishonest, insane, and intolerable."
"The aim of public education is not to spread enlightenment at all; it is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed and train a standardized citizenry, to put down dissent and originality. That is its aim in the United States, whatever the pretensions of politicians, pedagogues and other such mountebanks, and that is its aim everywhere else."
H.L. Mencken Quotes for the Cynical Soul originally appeared on Thought Grenades, the blog on Libertas Bella
