H. L. Mencken Quotes

All forms of government are pernicious, including good government.

A democracy is ... accounted the meanest and worst of all forms of government.

There is no such thing as a good government. There never was. There can't be.

Modern political science started in the late nineteenth century as a branch of history.

While all other sciences have advanced, that of government is at a standstill—little better understood, little better practiced now than three or four thousand years ago.

I would like to have insights into things like government, all those big ideas that you brought up that I simply don't have ideas about. I would like to be able to since so many people discuss them, but I don't want to work at them. I don't think my ambition is that strong in that direction.

All government is an evil, but, of the two form's of that evil, democracy or monarchy, the sounder is monarchy; the more able to do its will, democracy.

We have two distinct types of political organization to take into account; and clearly, too, when their origins are considered, it is impossible to make out that the one is a mere perversion of the other. Therefore when we include both types under a general term like government, we get into logical difficulties; difficulties of which most writers on the subject have been more or less vaguely aware, but which, until within the last half-century, none of them has tried to resolve.

When are people going to learn? Democracy doesn't work.

The problem to be solved is, not what form of government is perfect, but which of the forms is least imperfect.

In the end the problem isn't that you have the wrong sort of government for the People, but that you have the wrong sort of People.

It will be proper to take a review of the several sources from which governments have arisen, and on which they have been founded.

Government is at best but an expedient; but most governments are usually, and all governments are sometimes, inexpedient.

The French - who read and theorize the most - became so addicted to political experiment that in the two centuries since our own rather drab revolution they have exuberantly produced one Directory, one Consulate, two empires, three restorations of the monarchy, and five republics. That's what happens when you take writing too seriously.

I hold them [politics] to be subject to laws as fixed as matter itself, and to be as fit a subject for the application of the highest intellectual power.

I was a political science major in college because that's where my head was.

Politics - I don't know why, but they seem to have a tendency to separate us, to keep us from one another, while nature is always and ever making efforts to bring us together.

How could you say the best form of government is a republic if you think the universe is a monarchy?

How can I, that girl standing there, My attention fix On Roman or on Russian Or on Spanish politics?

All such men are, or ought to be, agreed, that simple governments are despotisms; and of all despotisms, a democracy, though the least durable, is the most violent.

Democracy has nothing to do with freedom. Democracy is a soft variant of communism, and rarely in the history of ideas has it been taken for anything else.

The other day, someone told me the difference between a democracy and a people's democracy. It's the same difference between a jacket and a straitjacket.

The experience of all former ages had shown that of all human governments, democracy was the most unstable, fluctuating and short-lived.

Even respectable characters speak of a monarchical form of government without horror.

I think I will still feel that same appreciation for what [Winston] Churchill and others have said is the worst form of government except all the alternatives.