H. L. Mencken Quotes

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

• democracy

Under democracy one party always devotes its chief energies to trying to prove that the other party is unfit to rule - and both commonly succeed, and are right.

• government
• democracy

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.

• politics

The urge to save humanity is almost always only a false-face for the urge to rule it.

• tyranny