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Free speech is too dangerous to a democracy to be permitted
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
Permitted
Speech
Dangerous
Democracy
Free
More quotes by H. L. Mencken
The curse of man, and the cause of nearly all his woe, is his stupendous capacity for believing the incredible.
H. L. Mencken
After all, all he did was string together a lot of old, well-known quotations.
H. L. Mencken
Absence is the dark-room in which lovers develop negatives.
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It is the natural tendency of the ignorant to believe what is not true. In order to overcome that tendency it is not sufficient to exhibit the true it is also necessary to expose and denounce the false.
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I can't imagine a genuinely intelligent boy getting much out of college, even out of a good college, save it be a cynical habit of mind.
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Congress consists of one-third, more or less, scoundrels two-thirds, more or less, idiots and three-thirds, more or less, poltroons.
H. L. Mencken
A skeptic as to all ideas, including especially my own, I have never suffered a pang when the ideas of some other imbecile prevailed.
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Hamlet has been played by 5,000 actors, no wonder he is crazy.
H. L. Mencken
Journalism is to politician as dog is to lamp-post.
H. L. Mencken
A wealthy man is one who earns $100 a year more than his wife's sister's husband.
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A man of active and resilient mind outwears his friendships just as certainly as he outwears his love affairs, his politics and his epistemology.
H. L. Mencken
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.
H. L. Mencken
If a sense of duty tortures a man, it also enables him to achieve prodigies.
H. L. Mencken
All government, in its essence, is a conspiracy against the superior man: it's one permanent object is to oppress him and cripple him... One of its primary functions is to regiment men by force, to make them as much alike as possible and as dependent upon one another as possible, to search out and combat originality among them.
H. L. Mencken
One seldom discovers a true believer that is worth knowing.
H. L. Mencken
When I hear artists or authors making fun of businessmen, I think of a regiment in which the band makes fun of the cooks.
H. L. Mencken
A newspaper is a device for making the ignorant more ignorant and the crazy crazier.
H. L. Mencken
A dull, dark, depressing day in Winter: the whole world looks like a Methodist church at Wednesday night prayer meeting.
H. L. Mencken
Don't overestimate the decency of the human race.
H. L. Mencken
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
