H. L. Mencken People Quotations

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.

I never lecture, not because I am shy or a bad speaker, but simply because I detest the sort of people who go to lectures and don't want to meet them.

Most people want security in this world, not liberty.

A large part of altruism, even when it is perfectly honest, is grounded upon the fact that it is uncomfortable to have unhappy people about one.

People say we need religion when what they really mean is we need police.

There has been no organized effort to keep government down since Jefferson's day. Ever since then the American people have been bolstering up its powers and giving it more and more jurisdiction over their affairs. They pay for that folly in increased taxes and diminished liberties.

The main thing that every political campaign in the United States demonstrates is that the politicians of all parties, despite their superficial enmities, are really members of one great brotherhood. Their principal, and indeed their sole, object is to collar public office, with all the privileges and profits that go therewith. They achieve this collaring by buying votes with other people's money.

There are some people who read too much: The bibliobibuli.

I hate sports the way people who like sports hate common sense.

I am suspicious of all the things that the average people believes.

I think the Negro people should feel secure enough by now to face a reasonable ridicule without terror. I am unalterably opposed to all efforts to put down free speech, whatever the excuse.

The American people, taking one with another, constitute the most timorous, snivelling, poltroonish, ignominious mob of serfs and goosesteppers ever gathered under one flag in Christendom since the end of the Middle Ages.

Sometimes the idiots outvote the sensible people.

People constantly speak of 'the government' doing this or that, as they might speak of God doing it. But the government is really nothing but a group of men, and usually they are very inferior men. They may have some better man working for them, but they themselves are seldom worthy of any respect.

A great nation is any mob of people which produces at least one honest man a century.

Any defeat, however trivial, may be fatal to a savior of the plain people. They never admire a messiah with a bloody nose.

All talk of winning the people by appealing to their intelligence, of conquering them by impeccable syllogism, is so much moonshine.

The American people, I am convinced, really detest free speech. At the slightest alarm they are ready and eager to put it down.

Better than the rest of us, they [the Jews] sensed what was ahead for their people.

The plain people, hereafter as in the past, will continue to make their own language, and the best that grammarians can do is to follow after it, haltingly, and not often with much insight into it.

Pedagogues: More than any other class of blind leaders of the blind they are responsible for the degrading standardization which now afflicts the American people.

If the American people really tire of democracy and want to make a trial of Fascism, I shall be the last person to object. But if that is their mood, then they had better proceed toward their aim by changing the Constitution and not by forgetting it.

[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.

Jury - A group of 12 people, who, having lied to the judge about their health, hearing, and business engagements, have failed to fool him.

The American people, North and South, went into the [Civil] war as citizens of their respective states, they came out as subjects ... what they thus lost they have never got back.