H. L. Mencken Freedom Quotations

For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.

It is inaccurate to say that I hate everything. I am strongly in favor of common sense, common honesty, and common decency. This makes me forever ineligible for public office.

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

Conscience is a mother-in-law whose visit never ends.

Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance.

A newspaper is a device for making the ignorant more ignorant and the crazy crazier.

Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under.

In this world of sin and sorrow there is always something to be thankful for; as for me, I rejoice that I am not a Republican.

Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.

Say what you will about the ten commandments, you must always come back to the pleasant fact that there are only ten of them.

Most people want security in this world, not liberty.

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.

We must be willing to pay a price for freedom.

Democracy is also a form of worship. It is the worship of Jackals by Jackasses.

Conscience is the inner voice that warns us that someone might be looking.

I believe in only one thing: liberty; but I do not believe in liberty enough to want to force it upon anyone.

Giving every man a vote has no more made men wise and free than Christianity has made them good.

The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule.

Truth would quickly cease to be stranger than fiction, once we got as used to it.

Freedom of press is limited to those who own one.

The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one's time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all.

The kind of man who demands that government enforce his ideas is always the kind whose ideas are idiotic.

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.

I believe in only one thing and that thing is human liberty. If ever a man is to achieve anything like dignity, it can happen only if superior men are given absolute freedom to think what they want to think and say what they want to say. I am against any man and any organization which seeks to limit or deny that freedom ... the superior man can be sure of freedom only if it is given to all men.

Truth - Something somehow discreditable to someone.

Firmness in decision is often merely a form of stupidity. It indicates an inability to think the same thing out twice.

The argument that capital punishment degrades the state is moonshine, for if that were true then it would degrade the state to send men to war... The state, in truth, is degraded in its very nature: a few butcheries cannot do it any further damage.

Remorse-Regret that one waited so long to do it.

Liberals have many tails and chase them all.

Of government, at least in democratic states, it may be said briefly that it is an agency engaged wholesale, and as a matter of solemn duty, in the performance of acts which all self-respecting individuals refrain from as a matter of common decency.

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.

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

Lawyer: one who protects us against robbery by taking away the temptation.

For every problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.

Injustice is relatively easy to bear; what sting is justice.

Creator: A comedian whose audience is afraid to laugh.

They have taken the care and upbringing of children out of the hands of parents, where it belongs, and thrown it upon a gang of irresponsible and unintelligent quacks.

I am against slavery simply because I dislike slaves.

Liberty is not for these slaves; I do not advocate inflicting it against their conscience. On the contrary, I am strongly in favor of letting them crawl and grovel all they please before whatever fraud or combination of frauds they choose to venerate...Our whole practical government is grounded in mob psychology and the Boobus Americanus will follow any command that promises to make him safer.

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.

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.

All [zoos] actually offer to the public in return for the taxes spent upon them is a form of idle and witless amusement, compared to which a visit to a penitentiary, or even to a State legislature in session, is informing, stimulating and ennobling.

What I admire most in any man is a serene spirit, a steady freedom from moral indignation, and all-embracing tolerance--in brief,what is commonly called sportsmanship.

A professional politician is a professionally dishonorable man. In order to get anywhere near high office he has to make so many compromises and submit to so many humiliations that he becomes indistinguishable from a streetwalker.

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.

Imagine the Creator as a low comedian, and at once the world becomes explicable.

the average man does not want to be free. he simply wants to be safe.

The cosmos is a gigantic flywheel making 10,000 revolutions per minute. Man is a sick fly taking a dizzy ride on it.

Hanging one scoundrel, it appears, does not deter the next. Well, what of it? The first one is at least disposed of.