Here is tragedy—and here is America. For the curse of the country, as well of all democracies, is precisely the fact that it treats its best men as enemies. The aim of our society, if it may be said to have an aim, is to iron them out. The ideal American, in the public sense, is a respectable vacuum.
~ H. L. Mencken
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Liberty and democracy are eternal enemies, and every one knows it who has ever given any sober reflection to the matter.
~ H. L. Mencken
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The strange American ardor for passing laws, the insane belief in regulation and punishment, plays into the hands of the reformers, most of them quacks themselves. Their efforts, even when honest, seldom accomplish any appreciable good.
~ H. L. Mencken
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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.
~ H. L. Mencken
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It is the dull man who is always sure, and the sure man who is always dull.
~ H. L. Mencken
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The great artists of the world are never Puritans, and seldom even ordinarily respectable.
~ H. L. Mencken
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Explanations exist; they have existed for all time; there is always a well-known solution to every human problem — neat, plausible, and wrong.
~ H. L. Mencken
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Civilization, in fact, grows more and more maudlin and hysterical; especially under democracy it tends to degenerate into a mere combat of crazes; 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, most of them imaginary.
~ H. L. Mencken
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Explanations exist; they have existed for all time; there is always a well-known solution to every human problem — neat, plausible, and wrong.
~ H. L. Mencken
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Truth would quickly cease to be stranger than fiction, once we got used to it.
~ H. L. Mencken
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