- “The state remains, as it was in the beginning, the common enemy of all well-disposed, industrious and decent men.” ~H. L. Mencken (1880-1956)
- “All I ask is equal freedom. When it is denied, as it always is, I take it anyhow.” ~H. L. Mencken (1880-1956)
- “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.” ~H. L. Mencken (1880-1956)
- “The urge to save humanity is almost always only a false-face for the urge to rule it.” ~H. L. Mencken (1880-1956)
- “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 invariably he comes to the conclusion that the government he lives under is dishonest, insane and intolerable, and so, if he is romantic, he tries to change it. And if he is not romantic personally, he is apt to spread discontent among those who are.” ~H. L. Mencken (1880-1956)
- “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.” ~H.L. Mencken (1880-1956)
- “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 (1880-1956)
- “Unionism seldom, if ever, uses such power as it has to insure better work; almost always it devotes a large part of that power to safeguarding bad work.” ~American writer H.L. Mencken (1880-1956)
- A certain section of medical opinion, in late years, has succumbed to the messianic delusion. Its spokesmen are not content to deal with the patients who come to them for advice; they conceive it to be their duty to force their advice upon everyone, including especially those who don’t want it. That duty is purely imaginary. It is born of vanity, not of public spirit. The impulse behind it is not altruism, but a mere yearning to run things ~H.L. Mencken
