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.”

“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.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“A bad man is the sort who weeps every time he speaks of a good woman.”

“Husbands never become good they merely become proficient.”

“If women believed in their husbands they would be a good deal happier and also a good deal more foolish.”

“There is a saying in Baltimore that crabs may be prepared in fifty ways and that all of them are good.”

“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.”

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

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

“No one in this world has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people. Nor has anyone ever lost public office thereby.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Love is the triumph of imagination over intelligence.”

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

“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.”

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

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