Quotes H. L. Mencken - page 7
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The acting that one sees upon the stage does not show how human beings comport themselves in crises, but how actors think they ought to. It is thus, like poetry and religion, a device for gladdening the heart with what is palpably not true.
Science is unflinchingly deterministic, and it has begun to force its determinism into morals. On some shining tomorrow a psychoanalyst may be put into the box to prove that perjury is simply a compulsion neurosis, like beating time with the foot at a concert or counting the lampposts along the highway.
Most people want security in this world, not liberty.
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the average man does not want to be free. he simply wants to be safe.
We must be willing to pay a price for freedom.
A politician is an animal which can sit on a fence and yet keep both ears to the ground.
A professional politician is a professionally dishonorable man. In order to get anywhere near high office he has to make so many compromises and submit to so many humiliations that he becomes indistinguishable from a streetwalker.
Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.
I believe in only one thing: liberty; but I do not believe in liberty enough to want to force it upon anyone.
The kind of man who demands that government enforce his ideas is always the kind whose ideas are idiotic.
The cosmos is a gigantic flywheel making 10,000 revolutions per minute. Man is a sick fly taking a dizzy ride on it.
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 are right.
Giving every man a vote has no more made men wise and free than Christianity has made them good.
There is always a well-known solution to every human problem - neat, plausible, and wrong.
It is hard to believe that a man is telling the truth when you know that you would lie if you were in his place.
Democracy is also a form of worship. It is the worship of Jackals by Jackasses.
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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 are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all.
