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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.

H. L. Mencken

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H. L. Mencken
Age: 75 †
Born: 1880
Born: September 12
Died: 1956
Died: January 29
Autobiographer
Essayist
Historian
Journalist
Linguist
Literary Critic
Satirist
Social Critic
Writer
Baltimore
Maryland
Henry Louis Mencken
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Keeping
Become
Bounds
Yields
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Measure
Tyrant
Men
Slave
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However
Tyrants
Liberty
Yield
Takes
Bound
Freedom
Tyranny

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No healthy man, in his secret heart, is content with his destiny. He is tortured by dreams and images as a child is tortured by the thought of a state of existence in which it would live in a candy store and have two stomachs.
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Man weeps to think that he will die so soon woman, that she was born so long ago.
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The sort of man who likes to spend his time watching a cage of monkeys chase one another, or a lion gnaw its tail, or a lizard catch flies, is precisely the sort of man whose mental weakness should be combated at the public expense, not fostered.
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I think the Negro people should feel secure enough by now to face a reasonable ridicule without terror. I am unalterably opposed to all efforts to put down free speech, whatever the excuse.
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Each party steals so many articles of faith from the other, and the candidates spend so much time making each other's speeches, that by the time election day is past there is nothing much to do save turn the sitting rascals out and let a new gang in.
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There is in writing the constant joy of sudden discovery, of happy accident.
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Lying is not only excusable it is not only innocent it is, above all, necessary and unavoidable. Without the ameliorations that it offers, life would become a mere syllogism and hence too metallic to be borne.
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No government is ever really in favor of so-called civil rights. It always tries to whittle them down. They are preserved under all governments, insofar as they survive at all, by special classes of fanatics, often highly dubious.
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To be in love is merely to be in a state of perceptual anesthesia - to mistake an ordinary young woman for a goddess.
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A prohibitionist is the sort of man one couldn't care to drink with, even if he drank.
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Hanging one scoundrel, it appears, does not deter the next. Well, what of it? The first one is at least disposed of.
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Confidence: The feeling that makes one believe a man, even when one knows that one would lie in his place
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School teachers, taking them by and large, are probably the most ignorant and stupid class of men in the whole group of mental workers.
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Genius: the ability to prolong one's childhood.
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I know some who are constantly drunk on books as other men are drunk on whiskey.
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I write in order to attain that feeling of tension relieved and function achieved which a cow enjoys on giving milk.
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The only way that a government can provide for jobs for all citizens is by deciding what every man should do.
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The late William Jennings Bryan, L.L.D., always had one great advantage in controversy he was never burdened with an understanding of his opponent's case.
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The true bureaucrat is a man of really remarkable talents. He writes a kind of English that is unknown elsewhere in the world, and an almost infinite capacity for forming complicated and unworkable rules.
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Women have a hard enough time in this world: telling them the truth would be too cruel.
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