Tag: H.L. Mencken

“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.”

H. L. Mencken

“What makes for the good society is a sound economy. Without it, all the rest falls apart.”

Lew Rockwell

“Parents own the children, and it is an issue of freedom and public health.”

Rand Paul

“Gun registration is a gateway drug.”

Mark Gilmore

“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.”

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 inevitably he comes to the conclusion that the government he lives under is dishonest, insane, and intolerable…”

H.L. Mencken

“Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance. No one in this world, so far as I know—and I have researched the records for years, and employed agents to help me—has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people. Nor has anyone ever lost public office thereby.”

H.L. Mencken

“Every normal man must be tempted, at times, to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats.”

H.L. Mencken

“Democracy: The state of affairs in which you consent to having your pocket picked, and elect the best man to do it.”

Benjamin Lichtenberg

“In debates between anarchists and statists, the burden of proof clearly should rest on those who place their trust in the state. Anarchy’s mayhem is wholly conjectural; the state’s mayhem is undeniably, factually horrendous.”

Robert Higgs

“Those who can’t teach – administrate. Those who can’t administrate – go into politics.”

H. L. Mencken

“I don’t know what’s best for other people.”

Penn Jillette

“Extreme positions are not succeeded by moderate ones, but by contrary extreme positions.”

Friedrich Nietzsche

“It seems like the less a statesman amounts to, the more he loves the flag.”

Kin Hubbard

“The immoral cannot be made moral through the use of secret law.”

Edward Snowden

“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.”

H. L. Mencken

“Gun bans disarm victims, putting them at the mercy of murderers or terrorists who think nothing of breaking the gun laws.”

Michael Badnarik

“The demagogue is one who preaches doctrines he knows to be untrue to men he knows to be idiots.”

H. L. Mencken

“The only way that a government can provide for jobs for all citizens is by deciding what every man should do.”

H. L. Mencken

“Folks, it’s time to evolve. That’s why we’re troubled. You know why our institutions are failing us, the church, the state, everything’s failing? It’s because, um – they’re no longer relevant. We’re supposed to keep evolving.”

Bill Hicks

“The illusion of freedom will continue as long as it’s profitable to continue the illusion.”

Frank Zappa

“An elective despotism was not the government we fought for.”

Thomas Jefferson

“A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until a majority of voters discover that they can vote themselves largess out of the public treasury.”

Alexander Fraser Tytler

“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.”

H.L. Mencken

“The most dangerous man to any government is the man who is able to think things out for himself.”

H. L. Mencken

“So what is government? Very simply, it is an agency of coercion. Of course, there are other agencies of coercion – such as the Mafia. So to be more precise, government is the agency of coercion that has flags in front of its offices.”

Harry Browne

“An honest politician is as unthinkable as an honest burglar.”

H. L. Mencken

“One of the greatest delusions in the world is the hope that the evils in this world are to be cured by legislation.”

Thomas B. Reed

“Teaching is a function, not a profession. Anything with something to offer can teach.”

John Taylor Gatto

“The government is good at one thing. It knows how to break your legs, and then hand you a crutch and say, ‘See if it weren’t for the government, you wouldn’t be able to walk’.”

Harry Browne

“When the people fear their government, there is tyranny; when the government fears the people, there is liberty.”

Thomas Jefferson

“Those who can’t teach – administrate. Those who can’t administrate – go into politics.”

H. L. Mencken

“Arms are the only true badge of liberty. The possession of arms is the distinction of a free man from a slave.”

Andrew Fletcher

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

H. L. Mencken

“Power must never be trusted without a check.”

John Adams

“The difference between a democracy and a dictatorship is that in a democracy you vote first and take orders later; in a dictatorship you don’t have to waste your time voting.”

Charles Bukowski

“The state remains, as it was in the beginning, the common enemy of all well-disposed, industrious and decent men.”

H. L. Mencken

“There is in all of a strong disposition to believe that anything lawful is also legitimate. This belief is so widespread that many persons have erroneously held that things are ‘just’ because the law makes them so.”

Frederic Bastiat

“When the government makes loans or subsidies to business, what it does is to tax successful private business in order to support unsuccessful private business.”

Henry Hazlitt

“If a law could keep dangerous weapons out of the hands of dangerous people, there would be virtually no gun crime at all.”

Harry Browne

“Your enemy is never a villain in his own eyes. Keep this in mind; it may offer a way to make him your friend. If not, you can kill him without hate — and quickly.”

Robert A. Heinlein

“The people’s hunger. Is due to the excess of their ruler’s taxation. So they starve.”

Laozi

“Conservatism is only as good as what it conserves.”

Friedrich Hayek

“The kind of man who wants the government to adopt and enforce his ideas is always the kind of man whose ideas are idiotic.”

H.L. Mencken

“I have often wondered why the sounds of the beating drums do not make the marching soldiers shoot their officers and go home.”

Albert J. Nock

“Formerly we suffered from crimes; now we suffer from laws.”

Cornelius Tacitus

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

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.”

H.L. Mencken

“The idea that even the brightest person or group of bright people, much less the U.S. Congress, can wisely manage an economy has to be the height of arrogance and conceit.”

Walter E. Williams

“The great non sequitur by defenders of the state: to leap from the necessity of society to the necessity of the state.”

Murray Rothbard

“Everything the State says is a lie, and everything it has it has stolen.”

Friedrich Nietzsche

“The art of government is the exclusive possession of quacks and frauds. It has been so since the earliest days, and it will probably remain so until the end of time.”

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.”

H.L. Mencken

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

H. L. Mencken

“All government, of course, is against liberty.”

H.L. Mencken

“The purpose of government is for those who run it to plunder those who do not.”

Thomas DiLorenzo