H. L. Mencken Democracy Quotations

Democracy is only a dream: it should be put in the same category as Arcadia, Santa Claus, and Heaven.

I confess I enjoy democracy immensely. It is incomparably idiotic, and hence incomparably amusing.

A good politician is quite as unthinkable as an honest burglar.

A politician is an animal which can sit on a fence and yet keep both ears to the ground.

If experience teaches us anything at all, it teaches us this: that a good politician, under democracy, is quite as unthinkable as an honest burglar.

The function of a newspaper in a democracy is to stand as a sort of chronic opposition to the reigning quacks. The minute it begins to out-whoop them it forfeits its character and becomes ridiculous.

A politician normally prospers under democracy in proportion ... as he excels in the invention of imaginary perils and imaginary defenses against them.

The doctrine that the cure for the evils of democracy is more democracy is like saying that the cure of crime is more crime.

The trouble with Communism is the Communists, just as the trouble with Christianity is the Christians.

Free speech is too dangerous to a democracy to be permitted

Democracy the domination of unreflective and timorous men, moved in vast herds by mob conditions.

If 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

What ass first let loose the doctrine that the suffrage is a high boon and voting a noble privilege?

[T]here is only one sound argument for democracy, and that is the argument that it is a crime for any man to hold himself out as better than other men, and, above all, a most heinous offense for him to prove it.

I do not believe in democracy, but I am perfectly willing to admit that it provides the only really amusing form of government ever endured by mankind.

Democracy must be a sound scheme at bottom, else it would not survive such cruel strains.

If the American people really tire of democracy and want to make a trial of Fascism, I shall be the last person to object. But if that is their mood, then they had better proceed toward their aim by changing the Constitution and not by forgetting it.

The cure for the evils of democracy is more democracy.

Democracy is grounded upon so childish a complex of fallacies that they must be protected by a rigid system of taboos, else even halfwits would argue it to pieces. Its first concern must be to penalize the free play of ideas.

The saddest life is that of a political aspirant under democracy. His failure is ignominious and his success is disgraceful.

Capitalism under democracy has a further advantage: its enemies, even when it is attacked, are scattered and weak, and it is usually easily able to array one half of them against the other half, and thus dispose of both.