H. L. Mencken

“Men have a much better time of it than women. For one thing, they marry later; for another thing, they die earlier.”

“The older I grow the more I distrust the familiar doctrine that age brings wisdom.”

“Say what you will about the ten commandments, you must always come back to the pleasant fact that there are only ten of them.”

“What men value in this world is not rights but privileges.”

“Love is the delusion that one woman differs from another.”

“Bachelors know more about women than married men; if they didn't they'd be married too.”

“The theory seems to be that as long as a man is a failure he is one of God's children, but that as soon as he succeeds he is taken over by the Devil.”

“A good politician is quite as unthinkable as an honest burglar.”

“The worst government is often the most moral. One composed of cynics is often very tolerant and humane. But when fanatics are on top there is no limit to oppression.”

“It is not materialism that is the chief curse of the world, as pastors teach, but idealism. Men get into trouble by taking their visions and hallucinations too seriously.”

“Whenever a husband and wife begin to discuss their marriage they are giving evidence at a coroner's inquest.”

“Marriage is a wonderful institution, but who would want to live in an institution?”

“There are men so philosophical that they can see humor in their own toothaches. But there has never lived a man so philosophical that he could see the toothache in his own humor.”

“Truth would quickly cease to be stranger than fiction, once we got as used to it.”

“It is even harder for the average ape to believe that he has descended from man.”

“Legend: A lie that has attained the dignity of age.”

“One of the most mawkish of human delusions is the notion that friendship should be eternal, or, at all events, life-long, and that any act which puts a term to it is somehow discreditable.”

“Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.”

“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, all of them imaginary.”

“Honor is simply the morality of superior men.”

“The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule.”

“I believe that all government is evil, and that trying to improve it is largely a waste of time.”

“In this world of sin and sorrow there is always something to be thankful for; as for me, I rejoice that I am not a Republican.”

“I believe that it is better to tell the truth than a lie. I believe it is better to be free than to be a slave. And I believe it is better to know than to be ignorant.”

“Legend: A lie that has attained the dignity of age.”

“Most people want security in this world, not liberty.”

“Faith may be defined briefly as an illogical belief in the occurrence of the improbable.”

“The older I grow the more I distrust the familiar doctrine that age brings wisdom.”

“It doesn't take a majority to make a rebellion; it takes only a few determined leaders and a sound cause.”

“Honor is simply the morality of superior men.”

“It is inaccurate to say that I hate everything. I am strongly in favor of common sense, common honesty, and common decency. This makes me forever ineligible for public office.”

“Love is the triumph of imagination over intelligence.”

“The worst government is often the most moral. One composed of cynics is often very tolerant and humane. But when fanatics are on top there is no limit to oppression.”

“A newspaper is a device for making the ignorant more ignorant and the crazy crazier.”

“Democracy is also a form of worship. It is the worship of Jackals by Jackasses.”

“It is not materialism that is the chief curse of the world, as pastors teach, but idealism. Men get into trouble by taking their visions and hallucinations too seriously.”

“Bachelors know more about women than married men; if they didn't they'd be married too.”

“The basic fact about human existence is not that it is a tragedy, but that it is a bore. It is not so much a war as an endless standing in line.”

“A national political campaign is better than the best circus ever heard of, with a mass baptism and a couple of hangings thrown in.”

“Marriage is a wonderful institution, but who would want to live in an institution?”

“For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.”

“Every normal man must be tempted, at times, to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats.”

“School teachers, taking them by and large, are probably the most ignorant and stupid class of men in the whole group of mental workers.”

“Love is like war: easy to begin but very hard to stop.”

“It was morality that burned the books of the ancient sages, and morality that halted the free inquiry of the Golden Age and substituted for it the credulous imbecility of the Age of Faith. It was a fixed moral code and a fixed theology which robbed the human race of a thousand years by wasting them upon alchemy, heretic-burning, witchcraft and sacerdotalism.”

“Democracy is the art and science of running the circus from the monkey cage.”

“If there is one mental vice, indeed, which sets off the American people from all other folks who walk the earth ... it is that of assuming that every human act must be either right or wrong, and that ninety-nine percent of them are wrong.”

“Nobody ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public.”

“An idealist is one who, on noticing that a rose smells better than a cabbage, concludes that it is also more nourishing.”

“Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under.”

“Of all escape mechanisms, death is the most efficient.”

“Puritanism. The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.”

“It is a fact that no man improves much after the age of 60 and after 65, most suffer a really alarming decline. I could give some examples, but at the advice of my publisher will refrain from doing so.”

“God is a comedian, playing to an audience too afraid to laugh.”

“Progress: The process whereby the human race has got rid of whiskers, the vermiform appendix and God.”

“Bachelors know more about women than married men; if they didn't they'd be married too.”

“All men are frauds. The only difference between them is that some admit it. I myself deny it.”

“Socialism is the theory that the desire of one man to get something he hasn’t got is more pleasing to a just God than the desire of some other man to keep what he has got.”

“Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance.”

“Nobody ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public.”

“The objection to Puritans is not that they try to make us think as they do, but that they try to make us do as they think.”

“The most dangerous man to any government is the man who is able to think things out... without regard to the prevailing superstitions and taboos. Almost inevitably he comes to the conclusion that the government he lives under is dishonest, insane, intolerable.”

“At the bottom of Puritanism one finds envy of the fellow who is having a better time in the world, and hence hatred of him. At the bottom of democracy one finds the same thing. This is why all Puritans are democrats and all democrats are Puritans.”

“Conscience is the inner voice that warns us that someone might be looking.”

“Truth would quickly cease to be stranger than fiction, once we got used to it.”

“Life is a constant oscillation between the sharp horns of dilemmas.”

“Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.”

“Self-respect: the secure feeling that no one, as yet, is suspicious.”

“Bachelors know more about women than married men. If they didn't, they'd be married, too.”

“The most costly of all follies is to believe passionately in the palpably not true. It is the chief occupation of mankind.”

“Explanations exist; they have existed for all time; there is always a well-known solution to every human problem — neat, plausible, and wrong.”

“Wealth - any income that is at least one hundred dollars more a year than the income of one's wife's sister's husband.”

“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.”

“A judge is a law student who marks his own examination papers.”

“We are here and it is now. Further than that, all human knowledge is moonshine.”

“No healthy man, in his secret heart, is content with his destiny. He is tortured by dreams and images as a child is tortured by the thought of a state of existence in which it would live in a candy store and have two stomachs.”

“What men value in this world is not rights but privileges.”

“The allurement that [women] hold out to men is precisely the allurement that Cape Hatteras holds out to sailors: they are enormously dangerous and hence enormously fascinating.”

“Immorality: the morality of those who are having a better time.”

“Women have a hard time of it in this world. They are oppressed by man-made laws, man-made social customs, masculine egoism, the delusion of masculine superiority. Their one comfort is the assurance that, even though it may be impossible to prevail against man, it is always possible to enslave and torture a man.”

“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.”

“The virulence of the national appetite for bogus revelation.”

“If, after I depart this vale, you ever remember me and have thought to please my ghost, forgive some sinner and wink your eye at some homely girl.”

“To the man with an ear for verbal delicacies — the man who searches painfully for the perfect word, and puts the way of saying a thing above the thing said — there is in writing the constant joy of sudden discovery, of happy accident.”

“Every election is a sort of advance auction sale of stolen goods.”

“Poverty is a soft pedal upon the branches of human activity, not excepting the spiritual.”

“We are here and it is now. Further than that, all human knowledge is moonshine.”

“Time is the great legalizer, even in the field of morals.”

“Women have simple tastes. They get pleasure out of the conversation of children in arms and men in love.”

“A man may be a fool and not know it, but not if he is married.”

“I was at the job of reading it for days and days, endlessly daunted and halted by its laborious dullness, its flatulent fatuity, its almost fabulous inconsequentiality. (On H. G. Wells' Joan and Peter) Ch. 2, "The Late Mr. Wells"”

“There is always an easy solution to every problem - neat, plausible, and wrong.”

“The public...demands certainties...But there are no certainties.”

“No one in this world, so far as I know - and I have searched the records for years, and employed agents to help me - has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people.”

“Every normal man must be tempted, at times, to spit upon his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats.”

“Love is the delusion that one woman differs from another.”

“All successful newspapers are ceaselessly querulous and bellicose. They never defend anyone or anything if they can help it; if the job is forced on them, they tackle it by denouncing someone or something else.”

“Love is the triumph of imagination over intelligence.”

“The great artists of the world are never Puritans, and seldom even ordinarily respectable. No virtuous man — that is, virtuous in the Y.M.C.A. sense — has ever painted a picture worth looking at, or written a symphony worth hearing, or a book worth reading.”

“It is even harder for the average ape to believe that he has descended from man.”

“To be in love is merely to be in a state of perpetual anesthesia — to mistake an ordinary young man for a Greek god or an ordinary young woman for a goddess.”

“Temptation is a woman's weapon and man's excuse.”

“A novelty loses nothing by the fact that it is a novelty; it rather gains something, and particularly if it meets the national fancy for the terse, the vivid, and, above all, the bold and imaginative.”

“The only really happy folk are married women and single men.”

“Philadelphia is the most pecksniffian of American cities, and thus probably leads the world.”

“All government, of course, is against liberty.”

“Off goes the head of the king, and tyranny gives way to freedom. The change seems abysmal. Then, bit by bit, the face of freedom hardens, and by and by it is the old face of tyranny. Then another cycle, and another. But under the play of all these opposites there is something fundamental and permanent — the basic delusion that men may be governed and yet be free.”

“We must respect the other fellow's religion, but only in the sense and to the extent that we respect his theory that his wife is beautiful and his children smart.”

“The American is marked, in fact, by precisely the habits of mind and act that one would look for in a man insatiably ambitious and yet incurably fearful, to wit, the habits, on the one hand, of unpleasant assertiveness, of somewhat boisterous braggardism, of incessant pushing, and, on the other hand, of conformity, caution and subservience. He is forever talking of his rights as if he stood ready to defend them with his last drop of blood, and forever yielding them up at the first demand.”

“It is impossible to imagine Goethe or Beethoven being good at billiards or golf.”

“It is the dull man who is always sure, and the sure man who is always dull.”

“To be in love is merely to be in a state of perceptual anesthesia - to mistake an ordinary young woman for a goddess.”

“How does so much [false news] get into the American newspapers, even the good ones? Is it because journalists, as a class, are habitual liars, and prefer what is not true to what is true? I don't think it is. Rather, it is because journalists are, in the main, extremely stupid, sentimental and credulous fellows -- because nothing is easier than to fool them -- because the majority of them lack the sharp intelligence that the proper discharge of their duties demands.”

“Say what you will about the ten commandments, you must always come back to the pleasant fact that there are only ten of them.”

“The only good bureaucrat is one with a pistol at his head. Put it in his hand and it's good-bye to the Bill of Rights.”

“The capacity of human beings to bore one another seems to be vastly greater than that of any other animal.”

“To sum up: 1. The cosmos is a gigantic fly-wheel making 10,000 revolutions a minute. 2. Man is a sick fly taking a dizzy ride on it. 3. Religion is the theory that the wheel was designed and set spinning to give him the ride.”

“An idealist is one who, on noticing that roses smell better than a cabbage, concludes that it will also make better soup.”

“If, after I depart this vale, you ever remember me and have thought to please my ghost, forgive some sinner and wink your eye at some homely girl.”

“Opera in English is, in the main, just about as sensible as baseball in Italian.”

“To be happy one must be (a) well fed, unhounded by sordid cares, at ease in Zion, (b) full of a comfortable feeling of superiority to the masses of one's fellow men, and (c) delicately and unceasingly amused according to one's taste. It is my contention that, if this definition be accepted, there is no country in the world wherein a man constituted as I am — a man of my peculiar weakness, vanities, appetites, and aversions — can be so happy as he can be in the United States.”

“Conscience is a mother-in-law whose visit never ends.”

“Marriage is a wonderful institution, but who would want to live in an institution?”

“When I mount the scaffold at last these will be my farewell words to the sheriff: Say what you will against me when I am gone, but don’t forget to add, in common justice, that I was never converted to anything.”

“Democracy is only a dream: it should be put in the same category as Arcadia, Santa Claus, and Heaven.”

“My literary theory, like my politics, is based chiefly upon one idea, to wit, the idea of freedom. I am, in belief, a libertarian of the most extreme variety.”

“Injustice is relatively easy to bear; what stings is justice.”

“The difference between a moral man and a man of honor is that the latter regrets a discreditable act, even when it has worked and he has not been caught.”

“I believe that all government is evil, and that trying to improve it is largely a waste of time.”

“What is any political campaign save a concerted effort to turn out a set of politicians who are admittedly bad and put in a set who are thought to be better. The former assumption, I believe is always sound; the latter is just as certainly false. For 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.”

“Strike an average between what a woman thinks of her husband a month before she marries him and what she thinks of him a year afterward, and you will have the truth about him.”

“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?”

“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.”

“The truth, indeed, is something that mankind, for some mysterious reason, instinctively dislikes. Every man who tries to tell it is unpopular, and even when, by the sheer strength of his case, he prevails, he is put down as a scoundrel.”

“The basic fact about human existence is not that it is a tragedy, but that it is a bore. It is not so much a war as an endless standing in line. The objection to it is not that it is predominantly painful, but that it is lacking in sense.”

“No one in this world, so far as I know—and I have researched the records for years, and employed agents to help me—has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people. Nor has anyone ever lost public office thereby.”

“It is [a politician's] business to get and hold his job at all costs. If he can hold it by lying, he will hold it by lying; if lying peters out, he will try to hold it by embracing new truths. His ear is ever close to the ground.”

“Public opinion, in its raw state, gushes out in the immemorial form of the mob's fear. It is piped into central factories, and there it is flavoured and coloured and put into cans.”

“Shave a gorilla and it would be almost impossible, at twenty paces, to distinguish him from a heavyweight champion of the world. Skin a chimpanzee, and it would take an autopsy to prove he was not a theologian.”

“No man ever entered the White House under the burden of a more inconvenient past. And no President was ever denounced with greater ferocity. -- said of Andrew Jackson”

“There are no mute, inglorious Miltons, save in the hallucinations of poets. The one sound test of Milton is that he functions as a Milton.”

“Love is the triumph of imagination over intelligence.”

“Injustice is relatively easy to bear; what stings is justice.”

“The older I grow the more I distrust the familiar doctrine that age brings wisdom.”

“Faith may be defined briefly as an illogical belief in the occurrence of the improbable.”

“A man full of faith is simply one who has lost (or never had) the capacity for clear and realistic thought. He is not a mere ass; he is actually ill. Worse, he is incurable, for disappointment, being essentially an objective phenomenon, cannot permanently affect his subjective infirmity. His faith takes on the virulence of a chronic infection. What he usually says, in substance, is this: "Let us trust in God, who has always fooled us in the past.”

“Say what you will about the ten commandments, you must always come back to the pleasant fact that there are only ten of them.”

“The most dangerous man to any government is the man who is able to think things out... without regard to the prevailing superstitions and taboos. Almost inevitably he comes to the conclusion that the government he lives under is dishonest, insane, intolerable.”

“The professor must be an obscurantist or he is nothing; he has a special and unmatchable talent for dullness, his central aim is not to expose the truth clearly, but to exhibit his profundity, his esotericity - in brief to stagger sophomores and other professors.”

“No man, I suppose, ever admits to himself candidly that he gets his living in a dishonourable way.”

“Democratic man, dreaming eternally of Utopias, is ever a prey to shibboleths.”

“Democratic man can understand the aims and aspirations of capitalism; they are, greatly magnified, simply his own aims and aspirations.”

“An aristocratic society may hold that a soldier or a man of learning is superior to a rich manufacturer or banker, but in a democratic society the latter are inevitably put higher, if only because their achievement is more readily comprehended by the inferior man, and he can more easily imagine himself, by some favour of God, duplicating it.”

“My business is not prognosis, but diagnosis. I am not engaged in therapeutics, but in pathology.”

“Democracy is shot through with this delight in the incredible, this banal mysticism. I have alluded to its touching acceptance of the faith that progress is illimitable and ordained of God - that every human problem, in the very nature of things, may be solved.”

“Democracy, in fact, is always inventing class distinctions, despite its theoretical abhorrence of them.”

“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.”

“What is not true, as everyone knows, is always immensely more fascinating and satisfying to the vast majority of men than what is true. Truth has a harshness that alarms them, and an air of finality that collides with their incurable romanticism.”

“The demagogue is one who preaches doctrines he knows to be untrue to men he knows to be idiots. The demaslave is one who listens to what these idiots have to say and pretends to believe it himself.”

“It is moral by his code to get into office by false pretences. It is moral to change convictions overnight. Anything is moral that furthers the main concern of his soul, which is to keep a place at the public trough.”

“All the benefit that a New Yorker gets out of Kansas is no more than what he might get out of Saskatchewan, the Argentine pampas, or Siberia. But New York to a Kansan is not only a place where he may get drunk, look at dirty shows and buy bogus antiques; it is also a place where he may enforce his dunghill ideas upon his betters.”

“Men become civilized, not in proportion to their willingness to believe, but in proportion to their readiness to doubt. The more stupid the man, the larger his stock of adamantine assurances, the heavier his load of faith.”

“What are the hallmarks of a competent writer of fiction? The first, it seems to me, is that he should be immensely interested in human beings, and have an eye sharp enough to see into them, and a hand clever enough to draw them as they are. The second is that he should be able to set them in imaginary situations which display the contents of their psyches effectively, and so carry his reader swiftly and pleasantly from point to point of what is called a good story.”

“If he became convinced tomorrow that coming out for cannibalism would get him the votes he needs so sorely, he would begin fattening a missionary in the White House yard come Wednesday.”

“No man can get anywhere in this world in any really and endurable manner without some recourse to books.”

“When A annoys or injures B on the pretense of saving or improving X, A is a scoundrel.”

“In the present case it is a little inaccurate to say I hate everything. I am strongly in favor of common sense, common honesty and common decency. This makes me forever ineligible to any public office of trust or profit in the Republic. But I do not repine, for I am a subject of it only by force of arms.”

“I believe in only one thing and that thing is human liberty. If ever a man is to achieve anything like dignity, it can happen only if superior men are given absolute freedom to think what they want to think and say what they want to say. I am against any man and any organization which seeks to limit or deny that freedom. . . [and] the superior man can be sure of freedom only if it is given to all men.”

“Democracy is the art and science of running the circus from the monkey cage.”

“I well recall my emotions when I came upon the grave of Beethoven in the Central Friedhof, with its incomparable guard of honor — Mozart, Schubert, Gluck, Brahms, Hugo Wolf and Johann Strauss!”

“God is a comedian, playing to an audience too afraid to laugh.”

“Nature abhors a moron.”

“The only really happy folk are married women and single men.”

“The most costly of all follies is to believe passionately in the palpably not true. It is the chief occupation of mankind.”

“Conscience is the inner voice that warns us somebody may be looking.”

“Nobody ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public.”

“Love is like war: easy to begin but very hard to stop.”

“Immorality is the morality of those who are having a better time. You will never convince the average farmer's mare that the late Maud S. was not dreadfully immoral.”

“An idealist is one who, on noticing that roses smell better than a cabbage, concludes that it will also make better soup.”

“A celebrity is one who is known to many persons he is glad he doesn't know.”

“Platitude — An idea (a) that is admitted to be true by everyone, and (b) that is not true.”

“Remorse — Regret that one waited so long to do it.”

“Self-respect — The secure feeling that no one, as yet, is suspicious.”

“We must be willing to pay a price for freedom.”

“Truth — Something somehow discreditable to someone.”

“We are here and it is now: further than that, all human knowledge is moonshine.”

“Historian — An unsuccessful novelist.”

“If, after I depart this vale, you ever remember me and have thought to please my ghost, forgive some sinner and wink your eye at some homely girl.”

“Christian — One who is willing to serve three Gods, but draws the line at one wife.”

“The New Deal began, like the Salvation Army, by promising to save humanity. It ended, again like the Salvation Army, by running flop-houses and disturbing the peace.”

“Democracy is the art and science of running the circus from the monkey cage.”

“The theory seems to be that so long as a man is a failure he is one of God's chillun, but that as soon as he has any luck he owes it to the Devil.”

“Love is an emotion that is based on an opinion of women that is impossible for those who have had any experience with them.”

“Judge — A law student who marks his own examination-papers.”

“All men are frauds. The only difference between them is that some admit it. I myself deny it.”

“A national political campaign is better than the best circus ever heard of, with a mass baptism and a couple of hangings thrown in.”

“Jury — A group of twelve men who, having lied to the judge about their hearing, health and business engagements, have failed to fool him.”

“Bachelors know more about women than married men; if they didn't they'd be married too.”

“Lawyer — One who protects us against robbers by taking away the temptation.”

“Jealousy is the theory that some other fellow has just as little taste.”

“Wealth — Any income that is at least $100 more a year than the income of one's wife's sister's husband.”

“Marriage is a wonderful institution, but who would want to live in an institution?”

“Misogynist — A man who hates women as much as women hate one another.”

“A man may be a fool and not know it — but not if he is married.”

“Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under.”

“In this world of sin and sorrow there is always something to be thankful for. As for me, I rejoice that I am not a Republican.”

“Theology — An effort to explain the unknowable by putting it into terms of the not worth knowing.”

“Creator — A comedian whose audience is afraid to laugh.”

“The one permanent emotion of the inferior man is fear - fear of the unknown, the complex, the inexplicable. What he wants above everything else is safety.”

“Sunday — A day given over by Americans to wishing that they themselves were dead and in Heaven, and that their neighbors were dead and in Hell.”

“A newspaper is a device for making the ignorant more ignorant and the crazy crazier.”

“Conscience is a mother-in-law whose visit never ends.”

“Q: If you find so much that is unworthy of reverence in the United States, then why do you live here? A: Why do men go to zoos?”

“A man who has throttled a bad impulse has at least some consolation in his agonies, but a man who has throttled a good one is in a bad way indeed.”

“When women kiss, it always reminds one of prize-fighters shaking hands.”

“In every unbeliever's heart there is an uneasy feeling that, after all, he may awake after death and find himself immortal. This is his punishment for his unbelief. This is the agnostic's Hell.”

“Puritanism: The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.”

“The lunatic fringe wags the underdog.”

“Women always excel men in that sort of wisdom which comes from experience. To be a woman is in itself a terrible experience.”

“If x is the population of the United States and y is the degree of imbecility of the average American, then democracy is the theory that x × y is less than y.”

“Love is the delusion that one woman differs from another.”

“No matter how happily a woman may be married, it always pleases her to discover that there is a nice man who wishes that she were not.”

“We must respect the other fellow's religion, but only in the sense and to the extent that we respect his theory that his wife is beautiful and his children smart.”

“I have often argued that a poet more than thirty years old is simply an overgrown child. I begin to suspect that there may be some truth in it.”

“Human life is basically a comedy. Even its tragedies often seem comic to the spectator, and not infrequently they actually have comic touches to the victim. Happiness probably consists largely in the capacity to detect and relish them. A man who can laugh, if only at himself, is never really miserable.”

“No government is ever really in favor of so-called civil rights. It always tries to whittle them down. They are preserved under all governments, insofar as they survive at all, by special classes of fanatics, often highly dubious.”

“God is the immemorial refuge of the incompetent, the helpless, the miserable. They find not only sanctuary in His arms, but also a kind of superiority, soothing to their macerated egos: He will set them above their betters.”

“Equality before the law is probably forever inattainable. It is a noble ideal, but it can never be realized, for what men value in this world is not rights but privileges.”

“All government, of course, is against liberty.”

“It is impossible to imagine the universe run by a wise, just and omnipotent God, but it is quite easy to imagine it run by a board of gods.”

“There are people who read too much: the bibliobibuli. I know some who are constantly drunk on books, as other men are drunk on whiskey or religion. They wander through this most diverting and stimulating of worlds in a haze, seeing nothing and hearing nothing.”

“The chief value of money lies in the fact that one lives in a world in which it is overestimated.”

“It is impossible to imagine the universe run by a wise, just and omnipotent God, but it is quite easy to imagine it run by a board of gods. If such a board actually exists it operates precisely like the board of a corporation that is losing money.”

“Puritanism. The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.”

“Mankind has failed miserably in its effort to devise a rational system of government. [...] The art of government is the exclusive possession of quacks and frauds. It has been so since the earliest days, and it will probably remain so until the end of time.”

“The more noisy Negro leaders, by depicting all whites as natural and implacable enemies to their race, have done it a great disservice. Large numbers of whites who were formerly very friendly to it, and willing to go to great lengths to help it, are now resentful and suspicious.”

“The State is not force alone. It depends upon the credulity of man quite as much as upon his docility. Its aim is not merely to make him obey, but also to make him want to obey.”

“Why assume so glibly that the God who presumably created the universe is still running it? It is certainly perfectly conceivable that He may have finished it and then turned it over to lesser gods to operate. In the same way many human institutions are turned over to grossly inferior men. This is true, for example, of most universities, and of all great newspapers.”

“Say what you will about the ten commandments, you must always come back to the pleasant fact that there are only ten of them.”

“The kind of man who wants the government to adopt and enforce his ideas is always the kind of man whose ideas are idiotic.”

“The urge to save humanity is almost always only a false-face for the urge to rule it. Power is what all messiahs really seek: not the chance to serve. This is true even of the pious brethren who carry the gospel to foreign parts.”

“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.”

“The chief difference between free capitalism and State socialism seems to be this: that under the former a man pursues his own advantage openly, frankly and honestly, whereas under the latter he does so hypocritically and under false pretenses.”

“Science, at bottom, is really anti-intellectual. It always distrusts pure reason, and demands the production of objective fact.”

“Moral certainty is always a sign of cultural inferiority. The more uncivilized the man, the surer he is that he knows precisely what is right and what is wrong. All human progress, even in morals, has been the work of men who have doubted the current moral values, not of men who have whooped them up and tried to enforce them. The truly civilized man is always skeptical and tolerant, in this field as in all others. His culture is based on "I am not too sure."”

“The course of the United States in World War II, I said, was dishonest, dishonorable, and ignominious, and the Sunpapers, by supporting Roosevelt's foreign policy, shared in this disgrace.”

“Men in the mass never brook the destructive discussion of their fundamental beliefs, and that impatience is naturally most evident in those societies in which men in the mass are most influential. Democracy and free speech are not facets of one gem; democracy and free speech are eternal enemies.”

“The majority of men prefer delusion to truth. It soothes. It is easy to grasp. Above all, it fits more snugly than the truth into a universe of false appearances—of complex and irrational phenomena, defectively grasped.”

“No one in this world, so far as I know - and I have searched the records for years, and employed agents to help me - has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people.”

“Nietzsche, an infinitely harder and more courageous intellect, was incapable of any such confusion of ideas; he seldom allowed sentimentality to turn him from the glaring fact.”

“Socialism, Puritanism, Philistinism, Christianity—he saw them all as allotropic forms of democracy, as variations upon the endless struggle of quantity against quality, of the weak and timorous against the strong and enterprising, of the botched against the fit.”

“This combat between proletariat and plutocracy is, after all, itself a civil war. Two inferiorities struggle for the privilege of polluting the world.”

“Politics, under a democracy, reduces itself to a mere struggle for office by flatterers of the proletariat; even when a superior man prevails at that disgusting game he must prevail at the cost of his self-respect. Not many superior men make the attempt. The average great captain of the rabble, when he is not simply a weeper over irremediable wrongs, is a hypocrite so far gone that he is unconscious of his own hypocrisy—a slimy fellow, offensive to the nose.”

“Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under.”

“For it is mutual trust, even more than mutual interest that holds human associations together. Our friends seldom profit us but they make us feel safe. Marriage is a scheme to accomplish exactly that same end.”

“It is even harder for the average ape to believe that he has descended from man.”

“Love is the triumph of imagination over intelligence.”

“Democracy is the art and science of running the circus from the monkey cage.”

“No one in this world, so far as I know - and I have searched the records for years, and employed agents to help me - has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people.”

“Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.”