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There are some politicians who, if their constituents were cannibals, would promise them missionaries in every pot.
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
Would
Cannibal
Missionaries
Constituents
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Politicians
Politician
Promise
Every
Cannibals
More quotes by H. L. Mencken
The highfalutin aims of democracy, whether real or imaginary, are always assumed to be identical with its achievements. This, of course, is sheer hallucination. Not one of those aims, not even the aim of giving every adult a vote, has been realized. It has no more made men wise and free than Christianity has made them good.
H. L. Mencken
Suppose two-thirds of the members of the national House of Representatives were dumped into the Washington garbage incinerator tomorrow, what would we lose to offset our gain of their salaries and the salaries of their parasites?
H. L. Mencken
I believe that religion, generally speaking, has been a curse to mankind - that its modest and greatly overestimated services on the ethical side have been more than overcome by the damage it has done to clear and honest thinking.
H. L. Mencken
[T]he only thing wrong with Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address was that it was the South, not the North, that was fighting for a government of the people, by the people and for the people.
H. L. Mencken
[T]here is only one sound argument for democracy, and that is the argument that it is a crime for any man to hold himself out as better than other men, and, above all, a most heinous offense for him to prove it.
H. L. Mencken
No married man is genuinely happy if he has to drink worse whisky than he used to drink when he was single.
H. L. Mencken
Life without sex might be safer but it would be unbearably dull
H. L. Mencken
Historian: an unsuccessful novelist.
H. L. Mencken
On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.
H. L. Mencken
I give you Chicago. It is not London and Harvard. It is not Paris and buttermilk. It is American in every chitling and sparerib. It is alive from snout to tail.
H. L. Mencken
Journalism is to politician as dog is to lamp-post.
H. L. Mencken
The argument that capital punishment degrades the state is moonshine, for if that were true then it would degrade the state to send men to war... The state, in truth, is degraded in its very nature: a few butcheries cannot do it any further damage.
H. L. Mencken
Theology is the effort to explain the unknowable in terms of the not worth knowing.
H. L. Mencken
A cynic is a man who, when he smells flowers, looks around for a coffin.
H. L. Mencken
Conscience is the inner voice that warns us that someone might be looking.
H. L. Mencken
Whenever a reporter is assigned to cover a Methodist conference, he comes home an atheist.
H. L. Mencken
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
A wealthy man is one who earns $100 a year more than his wife's sister's husband.
H. L. Mencken
Nothing can come out of an artist that is not in the man.
H. L. Mencken
Unsuccessful candidates for the Presidency should be quietly hanged as a matter of public sanitation and decorum.
H. L. Mencken
