Mencken Democracy Quotes & Sayings

Free speech is too dangerous to a democracy to be permitted — H.L. Mencken

We must think of human progress, not as of something going on in the race in general, but as of something going on in a small minority, perpetually beleaguered in a few walled towns. Now and then the horde of barbarians outside breaks through, and we have an armed effort to halt the process. That is, we have a Reformation, a French Revolution, a war for democracy, a Great Awakening. The minority is decimated and driven to cover. But a few survive - and a few are enough to carry on. — H.L. Mencken

Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance. 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. — H.L. Mencken

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 times y is less than y — H.L. Mencken

The doctrine that the cure for the evils of democracy is more democracy is like saying that the cure of crime is more crime. — H.L. Mencken

[T]here is only one sound argument for democracy, and that is the argument that it is a crime for any man to hold himself out as better than other men, and, above all, a most heinous offense for him to prove it. — H.L. Mencken

Capitalism under democracy has a further advantage: its enemies, even when it is attacked, are scattered and weak, and it is usually easily able to array one half of them against the other half, and thus dispose of both. — H.L. Mencken

Civilization, in fact, grows 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 an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary. Wars are no longer waged by the will of superior men, capable of judging dispassionately and intelligently the causes behind them and the effects flowing out of them. The are now begun by first throwing a mob into a panic; they are ended only when it has spent its ferine fury. — H.L. Mencken

H.L.Mencken's war aims, according to the handful of observers who deigned to notice his conflict, were the overthrow of American Democracy, the Christian religion, and the YMCA. He was also credited with trying to wipe out poets and luncheon orators. — Ben Hecht

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. — H.L. Mencken

What ass first let loose the doctrine that the suffrage is a high boon and voting a noble privilege? — H.L. Mencken

Democracy must be a sound scheme at bottom, else it would not survive such cruel strains. — H.L. Mencken

Democracy is the worship of jackals by jackasses. — H.L. Mencken

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. — H.L. Mencken

The seasick passenger on an ocean liner detests the good sailor who stalks past him 265 times a day grandly smoking a large, greasy cigar. In precisely the same way the democrat hates the man who is having a better time in the world. This is the origin of democracy. It is also the origin of Puritanism. — H.L. Mencken

A normal woman, indeed, no more believes in democracy in the nation than she believes in democracy at her own fireside; she knows that there must be a class to order and a class to obey, and that the two can never coalesce. Nor is she, susceptible to the stock sentimentalities upon which the whole democratic process is based. This was shown very dramatically in them United States at the national election of 1920, in which the late Woodrow Wilson was brought down to colossal and ignominious defeat - The first general election in which all American women could vote. All the sentimentality of the situation was on the side of Wilson, and yet fully three-fourths of the newly-enfranchised women voters voted against him. — H.L. Mencken

The function of a newspaper in a democracy is to stand as a sort of chronic opposition to the reigning quacks. The minute it begins to out-whoop them it forfeits its character and becomes ridiculous. — H.L. Mencken

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. — H.L. Mencken

Democracy is grounded upon so childish a complex of fallacies that they must be protected by a rigid system of taboos, else even halfwits would argue it to pieces. Its first concern must be to penalize the free play of ideas. — H.L. Mencken

He [Mencken] was an autodidact, with all the misplaced confidence and all the astonishing gaps that characterize that breed. Not many of us would venture to write a book about democracy without ever having read de Tocqueville, nor embark on a translation of Nietzsche with only a sketchy knowledge of German. — John Derbyshire

A politician normally prospers under democracy in proportion ... as he excels in the invention of imaginary perils and imaginary defenses against them. — H.L. Mencken

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

I do not believe in democracy, but I am perfectly willing to admit that it provides the only really amusing form of government ever endured by mankind. — H.L. Mencken

Liberty and democracy are eternal enemies, and every one knows it who has ever given any sober reflection to the matter. — H.L. Mencken

The art of politics, under democracy, is simply the art of ringing it. Two branches reveal themselves. There is the art of the demagogue, and there is the art of what may be called, by a shot-gun marriage of Latin and Greek, the demaslave. They are complementary, and both of them are degrading to their practitioners. 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 then pretends that he believes it himself. — H.L. Mencken

law tends more and more to be grounded upon the maxim that every citizen is, by nature, a traitor, a libertine, and a scoundrel. In order to dissuade him from his evil-doing the police power is extended until it surpasses anything ever heard of in the oriental monarchies of antiquity. - H. L. MENCKEN, NOTES ON DEMOCRACY — Radley Balko

I confess I enjoy democracy immensely. It is incomparably idiotic, and hence incomparably amusing. — H.L. Mencken

Democracy turns upon and devours itself. Universal suffrage, in theory the palladium of our liberties, becomes the assurance of our slavery. And that slavery will grow more and more abject and ignoble as the differential birth rate, the deliberate encouragement of mendicancy and the failure of popular education produce a larger and larger mass of prehensile half-wits, and so make the demagogues more and more secure. — H.L. Mencken

Adultery is the application of democracy to love. — H.L. Mencken

Giving every man a vote has no more made men wise and free than Christianity has made them good. — H.L. Mencken

Democracy the domination of unreflective and timorous men, moved in vast herds by mob conditions. — H.L. Mencken

Democracy is only a dream: it should be put in the same category as Arcadia, Santa Claus, and Heaven. — H.L. Mencken

As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. 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. — H.L. Mencken

The demagogue is one who preaches doctrines he knows to be untrue to men he knows to be idiots. — H.L. Mencken

The most popular man under a democracy is not the most democratic man, but the most despotic man. The common folk delight in the exactions of such a man. They like him to boss them. Their natural gait is the goose step. — H.L. Mencken

Democracy is the art and science of running the circus from the monkey cage. H. L. MENCKEN — Frank Luntz

The saddest life is that of a political aspirant under democracy. His failure is ignominious and his success is disgraceful. — H.L. Mencken

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. — H.L. Mencken