H. L. Mencken Liberty Quotations

A politician normally prospers under democracy in proportion ... as he excels in the invention of imaginary perils and imaginary defenses against them.

Goverment is actually the worst failure of civilized man. There has never been a really good one, and even those that are the most tolerable are arbitary, cruel, grasping, and unintelligent.

I believe in only one thing and that thing is human liberty.

Liberty and democracy are eternal enemies, and every one knows it who has ever given any sober reflection to the matter.

There is only one justification for having sinned, and that is to be glad of it.

No form of liberty is worth a darn [sic] which doesn't give us the right to do wrong now and then.

All government, of course, is against liberty.

The average man's love of liberty is nine-tenths imaginary. It takes a special sort of man to understand and enjoy liberty and he is usually an outlaw in democratic societies.

A Progressive is one who is in favor of more taxes instead of less, more bureaus and jobholders, more paternalism and meddling, more regulation of private affairs and less liberty. In general, he would be inclined to regard the repeal of any tax as outrageous.

Government is actually the worst failure of civilized man.

Democracy turns upon and devours itself. Universal suffrage, in theory the palladium of our liberties, becomes the assurance of our slavery. And that slavery will grow more and more abject and ignoble as the differential birth rate, the deliberate encouragement of mendicancy and the failure of popular education produce a larger and larger mass of prehensile half-wits, and so make the demagogues more and more secure.

[Government's] great contribution to human wisdom...is the discovery that the taxpayer has more than one pocket.

The only good bureaucrat is one with a pistol at his head. Put it in his hand and it's good-by to the Bill of Rights.

The American people, North and South, went into the [Civil] war as citizens of their respective states, they came out as subjects ... what they thus lost they have never got back.

Most people want security in this world, not liberty.

Every election is a sort of advance auction sale of stolen goods.

The ideal Government of all reflective men, from Aristotle onward, is one which lets the individual alone - one which barely escapes being no government at all.