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Each party steals so many articles of faith from the other, and the candidates spend so much time making each other's speeches, that by the time election day is past there is nothing much to do save turn the sitting rascals out and let a new gang in.

H. L. Mencken

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H. L. Mencken
Age: 75 †
Born: 1880
Born: September 12
Died: 1956
Died: January 29
Autobiographer
Essayist
Historian
Journalist
Linguist
Literary Critic
Satirist
Social Critic
Writer
Baltimore
Maryland
Henry Louis Mencken
Nothing
Turn
Articles
Many
Politics
Candidates
Much
Party
Stealing
Time
Turns
Election
Faith
Save
Rascals
Making
Speech
Steals
Political
Sitting
Speeches
Past
Spend
Gang

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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.
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The typical lawmaker of today is a man wholly devoid of principle - a mere counter in a grotesque and knavish game. If the right pressure could be applied to him, he would be cheerfully in favor of polygamy, astrology or cannibalism.
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It is impossible to believe that the same God who permitted His own son to die a bachelor regards celibacy as an actual sin.
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Man is a beautiful machine that works very badly.
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Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.
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It is not the drinker, but the man who has just stopped drinking, who thinks the world is going to the dogs.
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Government is actually the worst failure of civilized man.
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Debussy--A pretty girl with one blue eye and one brown one.
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The most common of all follies is to believe in the palpably untrue.
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A great nation is any mob of people which produces at least one honest man a century.
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The mistake that is made always runs the other way. Because the plain people are able to speak and understand, and even, in many cases, to read and write, it is assumed that they have ideas in their heads, and an appetite for more. This assumption is a folly.
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Our literature, despite several false starts that promised much, is chiefly remarkable, now as always, for its respectable mediocrity.
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The average man gets his living by such depressing devices that boredom becomes a sort of natural state to him.
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American journalism (like the journalism of any other country) is predominantly paltry and worthless. Its pretensions are enormous, but its achievements are insignificant.
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Who ever heard, indeed, of an autobiography that was not (interesting)? I can recall none in all the literature of the world
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The American people, North and South, went into the [Civil] war as citizens of their respective states, they came out as subjects ... what they thus lost they have never got back.
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To wage a war for a purely moral reason is as absurd as to ravish a woman for a purely moral reason
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Historian: an unsuccessful novelist.
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The saddest life is that of a political aspirant under democracy. His failure is ignominious and his success is disgraceful.
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A living language is like a man suffering incessantly from small hemorrhages, and what it needs above all else is constant transactions of new blood from other tongues. The day the gates go up, that day it begins to die.
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