I give you Chicago. It is not London and Harvard. It is not Paris and buttermilk. It is American in every chitling and sparerib. It is alive from snout to tail.
H. L. MenckenWhen a private citizen is robbed, a worthy man is deprived of the fruits of his industry and thrift; when the government is robbed, the worst that happens is that certain rogues and loafers have less money to play with than they had before.
H. L. MenckenWhat the meaning of human life may be I don't know: I incline to suspect that it has none.
H. L. MenckenIf 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. MenckenA government at bottom is nothing more than a group of men, and as a practical matter most of them are inferior men. ... Yet these nonentities, by the intellectual laziness of men in general ... are generally obeyed as a matter of duty (and) assumed to have a kind of wisdom that is superior to ordinary wisdom.
H. L. Mencken