H. L. Mencken Quotes

The public are not stupid.

No one in this world, so far as I know - and I have searched 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.

I think it's a myth that American public or any other public is so stupid that they need to be constantly pricked.

The public's not stupid.

Palin, Limbaugh, Glenn Beck and others have made an art form of convincing far too many Americans to suspend their disbelief, and they have severely damaged the ability of our country to have serious discussions about serious challenges.

I do not believe in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance.

A newspaper is a device for making the ignorant more ignorant and the crazy crazier.

It is the folly of too many to mistake the echo of a London coffee-house for the voice of the kingdom.

It is precisely the purpose of the public opinion generated by the press to make the public incapable of judging, to insinuate into it the attitude of someone irresponsible, uninformed.

Before Watergate and Viet Nam, the American public, as a whole, believed everything it was told, and since then it doesn't believe anything, and both of those extremes hurt us because they prevent us from recognizing the truth.

Don’t underestimate the common sense of the American people. You do so at your jeopardy.

Allegations become facts, and facts become truth in the eyes of the public, whether they are true or not.

The polls demonstrate that 50 percent of Americans who get their news from TV think Saddam Hussein was behind the Twin Towers attack. Man, have they got ways for getting half-truths out right away now, thanks to TV! I think TV is a calamity in a democracy.

If you go and talk to most people, they mean well but they don't have much of a breadth on education, of knowledge of understanding what the real issues are and therefore they listen to pundits on television who tell them what they are supposed to think and they keep repeating that until pretty soon they say, 'Oh, well that must be true.'

If the majority of people were right, we'd be living in paradise. But we are not living in paradise, we are living in hell. What does it mean? That means the majority of people are wrong. So I never believed what people told me.

We now have a whole culture based on the assumption that people know nothing and so anything can be said to them.

There's so many lies being told throughout the media and people just run with the lies. They're numb to it. Too many followers, not enough leaders.

That's basically what's going on now: Everything is propaganda.

I think the media spends a lot of time fooling itself.

The process of shaping opinion, attitudes, and perceptions was termed the 'engineering of consent' by one of the founders of the modern public relations industry, Edward Bernays.

It may be true that you can't fool all the people all the time, but you can fool enough of them to rule a large country.

I think if you're a regular viewer of Fox News, you're among the most cynical people on planet Earth. I cannot think of a more cynical slogan than 'Fair and Balanced.'

Without censorship, things can get terribly confused in the public mind.

Those of our people who do not study history can be duped into believing anything.

What the people believe is true.