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| H. L. Mencken | | It is hard to believe that a man is telling the truth when you know that you would lie if you were in his place. | |
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| H. L. Mencken | | Democracy is a form of religion, it is the worship of jackals by jack asses. | |
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| H. L. Mencken | | The men the American people admire most extravagantly are the greatest liars:
the men they detest most violently are those who try to tell them the truth. | |
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| H. L. Mencken | | And what is a good citizen? Simply one who never says, does or thinks anything that is unusual. Schools are maintained in order to bring this uniformity up to the highest possible point. A school is a hopper into which children are heaved while they are still young and tender; therein they are pressed into certain standard shapes and covered from head to heels with official rubber-stamps. | |
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| H. L. Mencken | | The older I grow the more I distrust the familiar doctrine that age brings wisdom. | |
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| H. L. Mencken | | Debate, it seems to me, is one of the most useful of human inventions. It is the mother and father of all free inquiry and honest thought. It tests ideas, detects errors and promotes clear thinking. A man cannot stand up before it without exposing his whole intellectual stock of goods. | |
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| H. L. Mencken | | The notion that a radical is one who hates his country is naive and usually idiotic. He is, more likely, one who likes his country
more than the rest of us, and is thus more disturbed than the rest of us when he sees it debauched. He is not a bad citizen turning to crime; he is a
good citizen driven to despair. | |
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| H. L. Mencken | | The world always makes the assumption that the exposure of an error is identical with the discovery of truth -- that the error and truth are simply opposite. They are nothing of the sort. What the world turns to, when it is cured on one error, is usually simply another error, and maybe one worse than the first one. | |
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| H. L. Mencken | | 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. | |
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| H. L. Mencken | | Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under. | |
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| H. L. Mencken | | Whenever 'A' attempts by law to impose his moral standards upon 'B', 'A' is most likely a scoundrel. | |
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| H. L. Mencken | | To die for an idea: it is unquestionably noble. But how much nobler it would be if men died for ideas that were true. | |
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| H. L. Mencken | | It [the State] has taken on a vast mass of new duties and responsibilities; it has spread out its powers until they penetrate to every act of the citizen, however secret; it has begun to throw around its operations the high dignity and impeccability of a State religion; its agents become a separate and superior caste, with authority to bind and loose, and their thumbs in every pot. But it still remains, as it was in the beginning, the common enemy of all well-disposed, industrious and decent men. | |
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| H. L. Mencken | | Human progress is furthered, not by conformity, but by aberration. | |
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| H. L. Mencken | | No one ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public. | |
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| H. L. Mencken | | Moral certainty is always a sign of cultural inferiority. The more uncivilized the man, the surer he is that he knows precisely what is right and what is wrong. All human progress, even in morals, has been the work of men who have doubted the current moral values, not of men who have whooped them up and tried to enforce them. The truly civilized man is always skeptical and tolerant, in this field as in all others. His culture is based on "I am not too sure. | |
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| H. L. Mencken | | When a new source of taxation is found it never means, in practice, that an old source is abandoned. It merely means that the politicians have two ways of milking the taxpayer where they had only one before. | |
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| H. L. Mencken | | A Galileo could no more be elected president of the United States than he could be elected Pope of Rome. Both high posts are reserved for men favored by God with an extraordinary genius for swathing the bitter facts of life in bandages of self-illusion. | |
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| H. L. Mencken | | I believe that liberty is the only genuinely valuable thing that men have invented, at least in the field of government, in a thousand years. I believe that it is better to be free than to be not free, even when the former is dangerous and the latter safe. I believe that the finest qualities of man can flourish only in free air -- that progress made under the shadow of the policeman's club is false progress, and of no permanent value. I believe that any man who takes the liberty of another into his keeping is bound to become a tyrant, and that any man who yields up his liberty, in however slight the measure, is bound to become a slave. | |
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| H. L. Mencken | | The most dangerous man, to any government, is the man who is able to think things out for himself, without regard to prevailing superstition or taboo. | |
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| H. L. Mencken | | The aim of public education is not to spread enlightenment at all; it is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed and train a standardized citizenry, to put down dissent and originality. That is its aim in the United States, whatever the pretensions of politicians, pedagogues, and other such mountebanks, and that is its aim everywhere else...Their purpose, in brief, is to make docile and patriotic citizens, to pile up majorities, and to make John Doe and Richard Doe as nearly alike, in their everyday reactions and ways of thinking, as possible. | |
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| H. L. Mencken | | That erroneous assumption is to the effect that the aim of public education is to fill the young of the species with knowledge and awaken their intelligence, and so make them fit to discharge the duties of citizenship in an enlightened and independent manner. Nothing could be further from the truth. The aim of public education is not to spread enlightenment at all, it is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed and train a standardized citizenry, to put down dissent and originality. That is its aim in the United States, whatever the pretensions of politicians, pedagogues and other such mountebanks, and that is its aim everywhere else. | |
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| H. L. Mencken | | Government is actually the worst failure of civilized man. There has never been a really good one, and even those that are most tolerable are arbitrary, cruel, grasping and unintelligent. | |
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| H. L. Mencken | | Conscience is the inner voice that warns us somebody is looking. | |
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| H. L. Mencken | | I believe that all government is evil, and that trying to improve it is largely a waste of time. | |
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| H. L. Mencken | | The objection to Puritans is not that they try to make us think as they do, but that they try to make us do as they think. | |
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| H. L. Mencken | | No one ever heard of the truth being enforced by law. Whenever the secular arm is called in to sustain an idea, whether new or old, it is always a bad idea, and not infrequently it is downright idiotic. | |
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| H. L. Mencken | | The urge to save humanity is almost always only a false-face for the urge to rule it. | |
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| H. L. Mencken | | The average man does not want to be free. He simply wants to be safe. | |
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| H. L. Mencken | | For every problem there is one solution which is simple, neat, and wrong. | |
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| H. L. Mencken | | Every election is a sort of advance auction sale of stolen goods. | |
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| H. L. Mencken | | Government, in its very essence, is opposed to all increase in knowledge. Its tendency is always towards permanence and against
change...[T]he progress of humanity, far from being the result of government, has been made entirely without its aid and in the face if its constant and
bitter opposition. | |
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| H. L. Mencken | | As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron. | |
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| H. L. Mencken | | The art of politics, under democracy, is simply the art of ringing it. Two branches reveal themselves. There is the art of the demagogue, and there is the art of what may be called, by a shot-gun marriage of Latin and Greek, the demaslave. They are complementary, and both of them are degrading to their practitioners. The demagogue is one who preaches doctrines he knows to be untrue to men he knows to be idiots. The demaslave is one who listens to what these idiots have to say and then pretends that he believes it himself. | |
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| H. L. Mencken | | The urge to save humanity is almost always a false-face for the urge to rule it. | |
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| H. L. Mencken | | The whole drift of our law is toward the absolute prohibition of all ideas that diverge in the slightest form from the accepted platitudes, and behind that drift of law there is a far more potent force of growing custom, and under that custom there is a natural philosophy which erects conformity into the noblest of virtues and the free functioning of personality into a capital crime against society. | |
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| H. L. Mencken | | Liberty ... was a two-headed boon. There was first, the liberty of the people as a whole to determine the forms of their own
government, to levy their own taxes, and to make their own laws.... There was second, the liberty of the individual man to live his own life, within
the limits of decency and decorum, as he pleased -- freedom from the despotism of the majority. | |
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| H. L. Mencken | | It is the theory of all modern civilized governments that they protect and foster the liberty of the citizen; it is the practice of all of them to limit its exercise, and sometimes very narrowly. | |
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| H. L. Mencken | | Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard. | |
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| H. L. Mencken | | There is, in fact, no reason to believe that any given natural phenomenon, however marvelous it may seem today, will remain forever inexplicable. Soon or late the laws governing the production of life itself will be discovered in the laboratory, and man may set up business as a creator on his own account. The thing, indeed, is not only conceivable; it is even highly probable. | |
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| H. L. Mencken | | Unquestionably, there is progress. The average American now pays out twice as much in taxes as he formerly got in wages. | |
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| H. L. Mencken | | Faith may be defined briefly as an illogical belief in the occurence of the improbable. | |
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| H. L. Mencken | | The government consists of a gang of men exactly like you and me. They have, taking one with another, no special talent for the business of government; they have only a talent for getting and holding office. | |
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| H. L. Mencken | | It is the theory of all modern civilized governments that they protect and foster the liberty of the citizen; it is the practice of all of them to limit its exercise, and sometimes very narrowly. | |
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| H. L. Mencken | | The government consists of a gang of men exactly like you and me. They have, taking one with another, no special talent for the
business of government; they have only a talent for getting and holding office. Their principal device to that end is to search out groups who pant and
pine for something they can't get and to promise to give it to them. Nine times out of ten that promise is worth nothing. The tenth time is made good
by looting A to satisfy B. In other words, government is a broker in pillage, and every election is sort of an advance auction sale of stolen goods. | |
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| H. L. Mencken | | The state remains, as it was in the beginning, the common enemy of all well-disposed, industrious and decent men. | |
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| H. L. Mencken | | Judge: a law student who marks his own papers. | |
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| H. L. Mencken | | It is the fundamental theory of all the more recent American law...that the average citizen is half-witted, and hence not to be trusted to either his own devices or his own thoughts. | |
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| H. L. Mencken | | The most dangerous man, to any government, is the man who is able to think things out for himself, without regard to the
prevailing superstitions and taboos. Almost invariably he comes to the conclusion that the government he lives under is dishonest, insane and
intolerable, and so, if he is romantic, he tries to change it. And if he is not romantic personally, he is apt to spread discontent among those who are. | |
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| H. L. Mencken | | The common notion that free speech prevails in the United States always makes me laugh. | |
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| H. L. Mencken | | All I ask is equal freedom. When it is denied, as it always is, I take it anyhow. | |
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| H. L. Mencken | | It doesn't take a majority to make a rebellion; it takes only a few determined leaders and a sound cause. | |
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| H. L. Mencken | | The only kind of freedom that the mob can imagine is freedom to annoy and oppress its betters, and that is precisely the kind that we mainly have. | |
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| H. L. Mencken | | I believe there is a limit beyond which free speech cannot go, but it's a limit that's very seldom mentioned. It's the point where free speech begins to collide with the right to privacy. I don't think there are any other conditions to free speech. I've got a right to say and believe anything I please, but I haven't got a right to press it on anybody else. .... Nobody's got a right to be a nuisance to his neighbors. | |
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| H. L. Mencken | | The Gettysburg speech was at once the shortest and the most famous oration in American history...the highest emotion reduced to a few poetical phrases. Lincoln himself never even remotely approached it. It is genuinely stupendous. But let us not forget that it is poetry, not logic; beauty, not sense. Think of the argument in it. Put it into the cold words of everyday. The doctrine is simply this: that the Union soldiers who died at Gettysburg sacrificed their lives to the cause of self-determination -- that government of the people, by the people, for the people, should not perish from the earth. It is difficult to imagine anything more untrue. The Union soldiers in the battle actually fought against self-determination; it was the Confederates who fought for the right of their people to govern themselves. | |
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| H. L. Mencken | | Governments, whatever their pretensions otherwise, try to preserve themselves by holding the individual down ... Government itself, indeed, may be reasonably defined as a conspiracy against him. Its one permanent aim, whatever its form, is to hobble him sufficiently to maintain itself. | |
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| H. L. Mencken | | All government, in its essence, is organized exploitation, and in virtually all of its existing forms it is the implacable enemy of every industrious and well-disposed man. | |
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| H. L. Mencken | | [T]he only thing wrong with Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address was that it was the South, not the North, that was fighting for a government of the people, by the people and for the people. | |
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| H. L. Mencken | | All men are frauds. The only difference between them is that some admit it. I myself deny it. | |
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| Dr. Joseph Mengele | | The more we do to you, the less you seem to believe we are doing it. | |
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| Karl A. Menninger | | We need criminals to identify ourselves with, to secretly envy and to stoutly punish. They do for us the forbidden, illegal things we wish to. | |
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| Angela Merkel | | We can't constantly explain to our voters that taxpayers have to be on the hook for certain risks, rather than those who make a lot of money taking those risks. | |
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| Joost A. Merloo | | Psychologically, it is important to understand that the simple fact of being interviewed and investigated has a coercive influence. As soon as a man is under cross-examination, he may become paralyzed by the procedure and find himself confessing to deeds he never did. In a country where the urge to investigate spreads, suspicion and insecurity grow. | |
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| Mario Merola | | Pretty soon, there will not be any debate in this city about overcrowded prisons. AIDS will take care of that. | |
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| Thomas Merton | | May God prevent us from becoming 'right-thinking men' -- that is to say, men who agree perfectly with their own police. | |
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| Thomas Merton | | I am beginning to realize that "sanity" is no longer a value or an end in itself.
If modern people were a little less sane, a little more doubtful,
a little more aware of their absurdities and contradictions,
perhaps there might be the possibility of their survival. | |
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| Thomas Merton | | The most awful tyranny is that of the proximate utopia where the last sins are currently being eliminated and where, tomorrow, there will be no sins because all the sinners have been wiped out. | |
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| Howard Metzenbaum | | What good does it do to ban some guns. All guns should be banned. | |
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| Frank Straus Meyer | | The ideal type of the Communist is a man in whom all individual, emotional, and unconscious elements have been reduced to a minimum and subjected to the control of an iron will, informed by a supple intellect. That intellect is totally at the service of a single and compelling idea, made incarnate in the Communist Party: the concept of History as an inexorable god whose ways are revealed ‘scientifically’ through the doctrine and method of Marxism-Leninism. | |
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| Michelangelo | | I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free. | |
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| Michelangelo | | Trifles make perfection, and perfection is no trifle. | |
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| Jules Michelet | | The historian’s first duties are sacrilege and the mocking of false gods. They are his indispensable instruments for establishing the truth. | |
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| Michigan Supreme Court | | While the legislature has power, in the most comprehensive manner, to regulate the carrying and use of firearms, it has no power to constitute it a crime for a person, alien or citizen, to possess a revolver for the legitimate defense of himself and his property, said right being expressly granted by section 5, art. 2, of the State Constitution, to every person. | |
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| Michigan Supreme Court | | [Legislation] cannot constitutionally result in the prohibition of the possession of those arms which, by the common opinion and usage of law-abiding people, are proper and legitimate to be kept upon private premises for the protection of person and property. | |
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| Giovanni Miegge | | Religious liberty is primarily a man’s liberty to profess a faith different from that of the dominant religion, and to unite in public worship with those who share his faith. | |