Lies and Truth

The men the American public admire most extravagantly are the most daring liars; the men they detest most violently are those who try to tell them the truth.

A cynic is a man who, when he smells flowers, looks around for a coffin.

All men are frauds. The only difference between them is that some admit it. I myself deny it.

Any man who afflicts the human race with ideas must be prepared to see them misunderstood.

Criticism is prejudice made plausible.

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

For it is mutual trust, even more than mutual interest that holds human associations together. Our friends seldom profit us but they make us feel safe... Marriage is a scheme to accomplish exactly that same end.

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.

It is hard to believe that a man is telling the truth when you know that you would lie if you were in his place.

Love is the triumph of imagination over intelligence.

Men are the only animals that devote themselves, day in and day out, to making one another unhappy. It is an art like any other. Its virtuosi are called altruists.

Never let your inferiors do you a favor - it will be extremely costly.

Nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public.

Philosophy consists very largely of one philosopher arguing that all others are jackasses. He usually proves it, and I should add that he also usually proves that he is one himself.

Say what you will about the Ten Commandments, you must always come back to the pleasant fact that there are only ten of them.

The older I grow the more I distrust the familiar doctrine that age brings wisdom.

The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one's time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all.

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.

To die for an idea; it is unquestionably noble. But how much nobler it would be if men died for ideas that were true!

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.

Unquestionably, there is progress. The average American now pays out twice as much in taxes as he formerly got in wages.

The difference between a moral man and a man of honor is that the latter regrets a discreditable act, even when it has worked and he has not been caught.

There is always a well-known solution to every human problem--neat, plausible, and wrong.

~ H.L. Mencken
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