“I confess I enjoy democracy immensely. It is incomparably idiotic, and hence incomparably amusing”
http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/h/h_l_mencken.html
A newspaper is a device for making the ignorant more ignorant and the crazy crazier.
I couldn’t really chose just one…
“A judge is a law student who marks his own examination papers”
"I confess I enjoy democracy immensely. It is incomparably idiotic, and hence incomparably amusing. "
"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. "
At the beginning of my senior year in high school (aka last September), we were given those little blue books for a project concerning college essay topics. We had a sheet of various topics and were told to write about them. On the front cover, I wrote “a cynic is a man, who, when he smells flowers, looks around for a coffin.”
Alongside that was an Emo Philips quote: “How many of you know telekinesis? Raise my hand.” and another quote I don’t remember. I still have the book upstairs, probably.
“Adultery is the application of democracy to love.”
A perfect statement on democracy. When it comes to practical, everyday life, there can be no democracy - only trusting matters to authority, principle, competence. There is no democracy in a family household, there is no democracy in the workplace, there is no democracy in giving insurance, and so on.
Except we humans never understood this simple fact when crack-brained legislations are passed to make insurance “fairer”, to make bosses hire people the way others tell him to, to nationalise industries to make them more “democratic”, and so on.
If every aspect of human life were to be made democratic, why not family and children?
“School-days, I believe, are the unhappiest in the whole span of human existence. They are full of dull, unintelligible tasks, new and unpleasant ordinances, brutal violations of common sense and common decency. It doesn’t take a reasonably bright boy long to discover that most of what is rammed into him is nonsense, and that no one really cares very much whether he learns it or not.”
Doesn’t that just sum up government schooling?
Too many to remember all.
Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under.
Every election is an advance-auction on stolen goods.
Those are two of the best, imo.
“Every election is an advance-auction on stolen goods.”
This.
And there is this other gem, I’m saving.
Anyway, people should try source them. Makes me skeptical of some.. he’s so awesome that its kind of like the Lincoln quotes (except no myth).
"The dictatorship of the proletariat, tried here and there, has turned out to be - if I may venture a prejudiced judgment - somewhat impracticable.
Progress: The process whereby the human race has got rid of whiskers, the vermiform appendix, and God.
A good politician is quite as unthinkable as an honest burglar.
That’s a good one.
“School-days, I believe, are the unhappiest in the whole span of human existence. They are full of dull, unintelligible tasks, new and unpleasant ordinances, brutal violations of common sense and common decency. It doesn’t take a reasonably bright boy long to discover that most of what is rammed into him is nonsense, and that no one really cares very much whether he learns it or not.”
Ha! About an hour ago I flipped to random page of A Mencken Chrestomathy and read this for the first time. Here’s how Mecken proposes to improve the schools in an earlier section called “The Educational Process:”
" The best teacher of children, in brief, is one who is essentially childlike.
If I had my way I should expose all candidates for berths in the grade-schools to the Binet-Simon test, and reject all those who revealed a mentality of more than fifteen years. Plenty would still pass. Moreover, they would be secure against contamination by the new technic of pedagogy. Its vast wave of pseudo-psychology would curl and break against the hard barrier of their innocent and passionate intellects…But they would see in reading, writing and arithmetic the gaudy charms of profound knowledge, and they would teach these ancient branches, now so abominably in decay, with passionate gusto, and irresistible effectiveness, and a gigantic success."
Basically, we need stupid, enthusiastic teachers, not ones with grand delusions about their cutting-edge methods and knowledge of child psychology.
- Democracy is the theory that intelligence is dangerous. It assumes that no idea can be safe until those who can’t understand it have approved it.
- Democracy is also a form of worship. It is the worship of Jackals by Jackasses.
- Democracy is the art of running the circus from the monkey cage.
- Democracy is the pathetic belief in the wisdom of collective ignorance.