Political Insults & Putdowns

Quotes and Insulting Quotations from Henry Mencken

He slept more than any other president, whether by day or by night. Nero fiddled, but Coolidge only snored.
On Calvin Coolidge

He sailed through American history like a steel ship loaded with monoliths of granite.
On Grover Cleveland

If there had been any formidable body of cannibals in the country he would have promised them with free missionaries, fattened at the taxpayer's expense
On Harry Trueman's 1948 presidential campaign

A tin horn politician with the manner of a rural corn doctor and the mien of a ham actor
On William G Harding

Puritanism, the haunting fear that someone, somewhere may be happy.

No one in this world, so far as I know, and I have searched the records, and emplyed agents to help me, has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people.

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed, and hence clamourous to be led to safety, by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary

Under democracy one party always devotes its chief energies to trying to prove that the other party is unfit to rule, and both commonly succeed, and are right

Mr Mencken talks about truth as if she were his mistress, but he handles her like an iceman
Stuart Sherman 1868-1944 on HL Mencken