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H. L. Mencken

H. L. Mencken Quotes

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Famous H. L. Mencken Quotes

“What is any political campaign save a concerted effort to turn out a set of politicians who are admittedly bad and put in a set who are thought to be better. The former assumption, I believe is always sound; the latter is just as certainly false. For 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.”

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Book:PREJUDICES A SELECTION
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“The main thing that every political campaign in the United States demonstrates is that the politicians of all parties, despite their superficial enmities, are really members of one great brotherhood. Their principal, and indeed their sole, object is to collar public office, with all the privileges and profits that go therewith. They achieve this collaring by buying votes with other people's money.”

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Book:Minority Report
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“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.”

WholeGovernmentPoliticalPoliticsEnergyFreedomLibertyDemocracyEnvironmentSocietyCitizensAimSafetyThreatHistoricalSeriesClimate ChangeLibertarianPracticalsEndlessTyrannyIndividualismImaginaryThreatenedFreedom And LibertyFreedom LibertyProperty RightsMenacePeace WarLimited GovernmentDemocracies HaveLimiting GovernmentClamorLibertarian PartyLimited FreedomPolitical WillGreat LibertarianPolitical IssuesGovernment BureaucracyPrice Of FreedomLimiting FreedomSocial ControlCabalGovernment And PoliticsVoting Founding FathersMoney In Politics
Book:Mencken Chrestomathy
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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.”

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Author:H. L. Mencken
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“It is often argued that religion is valuable because it makes men good, but even if this were true it would not be a proof that religion is true. That would be an extension of pragmatism beyond endurance. Santa Claus makes children good in precisely the same way, and yet no one would argue seriously that the fact proves his existence. The defense of religion is full of such logical imbecilities.”

IfsMenWayChildrenFactsWould BePoliticalExistenceProveValuableDefenseProofArguingLogicalEnduranceExtensionsSantaSanta ClausPragmatismImbecility
Book:Minority Report
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“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.”

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Author:H. L. Mencken
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“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 one comes to the end of a campaign with one's ribs loose, and ready for King Lear, or a hanging, or a course of medical journals.”

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Author:H. L. Mencken
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“All the political seers and sorcerers seem to be agreed that the coming Presidential campaign will be full of bitterness, and that most of it will be caused by religion. I count Prohibition as a part of religion, for it has surely become so in the United States. The Prohibitionists, seeing all their other arguments destroyed by the logic of events, have fallen back upon the mystical doctrine that God is somehow on their side, and that opposing them thus takes on the character of blasphemy.”

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Author:H. L. Mencken
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“Five years of Prohibition have had, at least, this one benign effect: they have completely disposed of all the favorite arguments of the Prohibitionists. None of the great boons and usufructs that were to follow the passage of the Eighteenth Amendment has come to pass. There is not less drunkenness in the Republic, but more. There is not less crime, but more. There is not less insanity, but more. The cost of government is not smaller, but vastly greater. Respect for law has not increased, but diminished.”

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Author:H. L. Mencken
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