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Laws are no longer made by a rational process of public discussion they are made by a process of blackmail and intimidation, and they are executed in the same manner

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
Discussion
Rational
Laws
Longer
Public
Blackmail
Law
Executed
Process
Intimidation
Made
Manner

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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.
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The believing mind is externally impervious to evidence. The most that can be accomplished with it is to induce it to substitute one delusion for another. It rejects all overt evidence as wicked.
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Giving every man a vote has no more made men wise and free than Christianity has made them good.
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Better than the rest of us, they [the Jews] sensed what was ahead for their people.
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Philadelphia is the most pecksniffian of American cities, and thus probably leads the world.
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My belief in free speech is so profound that I am seldom tempted to deny it to the other fellow. Nor do I make any effort to differentiate between the other fellow right and that other fellow wrong, for I am convinced that free speech is worth nothing unless it includes a full franchise to be foolish and even...malicious.
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New York is the place where all the aspirations of the western world meet to form one vast master aspiration, as powerful as the suction of a steam dredge. It is the icing on the pie called Christian civilization.
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A national political campaign is better than the best circus ever heard of, with a mass baptism and a couple of hangings thrown in.
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The way to hold a husband is to keep him a little jealous the way to lose him is to keep him a little more jealous.
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Government, like any other organism, refuses to acquiesce in its own extinction. This refusal, of course, involves the resistance to any effort to diminish its powers and prerogatives.
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Whenever A annoys or injures B on the pretense of saving or improving X, A is a scoundrel.
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The formula of the argument is simple and familiar: to dispose of a problem all that is necessary is to deny that it exists.
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One seldom discovers a true believer that is worth knowing.
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