Quote

A politician normally prospers under democracy in proportion ... as he excels in the invention of imaginary perils and imaginary defenses against them.

H. L. Mencken

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Defense
Excels
Politician
Perils
Democracy
Defenses
Liberty
Peril
War
Normally
Imaginary
Proportion
Invention
Prospers

More quotes by H. L. Mencken

Image
Truth would quickly cease to be stranger than fiction, once we got as used to it.
H. L. Mencken
Image
Our whole practical government is grounded in mob psychology and the Boobus Americanus will follow any command that promises to make him safer.
H. L. Mencken
Image
The most common of all follies is to believe in the palpably untrue.
H. L. Mencken
Image
The average man gets his living by such depressing devices that boredom becomes a sort of natural state to him.
H. L. Mencken
Image
No democratic delusion is more fatuous than that which holds that all men are capable of reason, and hence susceptible to conversion by evidence. If religions depended upon evidence for their prolongation, then all of them would collapse.
H. L. Mencken
Image
Lying is not only excusable it is not only innocent it is, above all, necessary and unavoidable. Without the ameliorations that it offers, life would become a mere syllogism and hence too metallic to be borne.
H. L. Mencken
Image
The book of Genesis, a farrago of nonsense so wholly absurd that even Sunday-school scholars have to be threatened with Hell to make them accept it.
H. L. Mencken
Image
When women kiss it always reminds one of prize fighters shaking hands.
H. L. Mencken
Image
It is Hell, of course, that makes priests powerful, not Heaven, for after thousands of years of so-called civilization fear remains the one common denominator of mankind
H. L. Mencken
Image
Say what you will about the ten commandments, you must always come back to the pleasant fact that there are only ten of them.
H. L. Mencken
Image
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
Image
In the United States, doing good has come to be, like patriotism, a favorite device of persons with something to sell.
H. L. Mencken
Image
No one hates his job so heartily as a farmer.
H. L. Mencken
Image
Truth - Something somehow discreditable to someone.
H. L. Mencken
Image
Man is a beautiful machine that works very badly.
H. L. Mencken
Image
In Baltimore, soft crabs are always fried (or broiled) in the altogether, with maybe a small jock-strap of bacon added.
H. L. Mencken
Image
The only really respectable Protestants are the fundamentalists. Unfortunately, they are also palpable idiots.
H. L. Mencken
Image
I confess I enjoy democracy immensely. It is incomparably idiotic, and hence incomparably amusing.
H. L. Mencken
Image
The fact that a human brain of high amperage, otherwise highly efficient, may have a hole in it is surely not a secret.
H. L. Mencken
Image
The truth that survives is simply the lie that is pleasantest to believe.
H. L. Mencken