A newspaper is a device for making the ignorant more ignorant and the crazy crazier.
Tag: H. L. Mencken
(1880 – 1956) American journalist
I believe in only one thing
I believe in only one thing: liberty; but I do not believe in liberty enough to want to force it upon anyone.
The worst failure
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.
Decent men needed
Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under.
The religion of democracy
Democracy is a form of religion, it is the worship of jackals by jack asses.
Limiting our liberties
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.
The enemy is the State
[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.
Government vs. industry
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.
Secondary agenda
The urge to save humanity is almost always only a false-face for the urge to rule it. Power is what all messiahs really seek: Not the chance to serve.
Keeping bureaucrats honest
The only good bureaucrat is one with a pistol at his head. Put it in his hand and it’s good-bye to the Bill of Rights.