[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.
Tag: H. L. Mencken
(1880 – 1956) American journalist
Truth needs no law
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.
Extending police power
Law tends more and more to be grounded upon the maxim that every citizen is, by nature, a traitor, a libertine, and a scoundrel. In order to dissuade him from his evil-doing the police power is extended until it surpasses anything ever heard of in the oriental monarchies of antiquity.
Demagogues and demaslaves
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.
Government education
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.
Bureaucrats and guns
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.
Failings of the fourth estate
What chiefly distinguishes the daily press is its incurable fear of ideas, its constant effort to evade the discussion of fundamentals by translating all issues into a few elemental fears, its incessant reduction of all reflection to mere emotion.
The fundamental theory of American law
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.
New taxes atop old
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.
Admiring liars
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.