When a candidate for public office faces the voters he does not face men of sense; he faces a mob of men whose chief distinguishing mark is the fact that they are quite incapable of weighing ideas, or even of comprehending any save the most elemental - men whose whole thinking is done in terms of emotion, and whose dominant emotion is dread of what they cannot understand. So confronted, the candidate must either bark with the pack or be lost... All the odds are on the man who is, intrinsically, the most devious and mediocre.
H. L. MenckenHenry James would have been vastly improved as a novelist by a few whiffs of the Chicago stockyard.
H. L. MenckenIf what I may believe - about gall-stones, the Constitution, castor oil, or God - is conditioned by law, then I am not a free man.
H. L. MenckenIf experience teaches us anything at all, it teaches us this: that a good politician, under democracy, is quite as unthinkable as an honest burglar.
H. L. MenckenThe way for newspapers to meet the competition of radio and television is simply to get out better papers.
H. L. Mencken