“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
“You’ve got to rattle your cage door. You’ve got to let them know that you’re in there, and that you want out. Make noise. Cause trouble.”
Florynce Kennedy
“The safest way to make laws respected is to make them respectable.”
Frédéric Bastiat
“No country can be called free which is governed by an absolute power; and it matters not whether it be an absolute royal power or an absolute legislative power, as the consequences will be the same to the people.”
Thomas Paine
“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
“Secrecy begets tyranny.” ― Robert A. Heinlein, Stranger in a Strange Land
“Thinking doesn’t pay. Just makes you discontented with what you see around you.” ― Robert A. Heinlein, Stranger in a Strange Land
When I read quotes by men like H.L. Mencken and Robert Heinlein, I realize I’m not really a stranger in a strange land, even though I feel that way most of the time. These cynical, critical thinking, libertarian minded gentlemen understood government tended towards corruption and tyranny, the populace tended towards ignorance and distraction, and reality eventually teaches a harsh lesson to fools, knaves and dumbasses.
Sometimes we think the current day worldly circumstances are new and original, when human nature, politicians, and governments never really change. When Mencken and Heinlein were writing and providing social commentary during the 30’s, 40’s and 50’s, they observed the same fallacies, foolishness, lack of self-responsibility, government malfeasance, and inability of the majority to think critically, that are rampant in society today.
“Elections are futures markets in stolen property.”
H. L. Mencken
“The way to wealth depends on just two words, industry and frugality.”
Benjamin Franklin
“The state remains, as it was in the beginning, the common enemy of all well-disposed, industrious and decent men.”
H.L. Mencken
“Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys.”
P. J. O’Rourke
“The older I grow, the more I distrust the familiar doctrine that age brings wisdom.”
H.L. Mencken
“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, On Politics: A Carnival of Buncombe
“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, Prejudices: Third Series
“In the present case it is a little inaccurate to say I hate everything. I am strongly in favor of common sense, common honesty and common decency. This makes me forever ineligible to any public office of trust or profit in the Republic. But I do not repine, for I am a subject of it only by force of arms.”
H.L. Mencken
“Liberty and democracy are eternal enemies, and every one knows it who has ever given any sober reflection to the matter.”
H. L. Mencken
“The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule.”
H. L. Mencken
“The only time you have a free press is when you own one.”
H. L. Mencken
“The kind of man who demands that government enforce his ideas is always the kind whose ideas are idiotic.”
H. L. Mencken
[Newsweek column from February 20, 1956, and reprinted in Business Tides: The Newsweek Era of Henry Hazlitt.]
H.L. Mencken, who died on Jan. 29, was the outstanding American literary critic of his generation, its most influential stylist, its most prominent iconoclast, the chief scourge of the genteel tradition, and a great liberating force.
I devote this column to him in the hope of correcting a persistent misunderstanding about his economic and political ideas. The typical view, reflected in most of the obituaries, is that Mencken began as an arch-rebel and idol smasher; but that when the New Deal came along, he could not keep abreast of its “progressivism” and its “new ideas”; so the procession passed him by, exposing him as a mere “conservative.”
“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.”
H. L. Mencken
“Elections are a good deal like marriages, there’s no accounting for anyone’s taste. Every time we see a bridegroom we wonder why she ever picked him, and it’s the same with Public Officials.”
Will Rogers
“Do not overestimate the decency of the human race.”
H. L. Mencken
Guest Post by Fred Reed
Everything goes to hell. It warms a curmudgeon’s heart. I remember when, as God intended, reporters were bright and profane drunks with no respect for anything. This philosophical end-point was natural for men steeped daily in the lying, thieving, corruption, bribes, shysterism, misery, and unrelenting stupidity that are public life. Ashen-souled, cynical, with a wonderful acerbic sense of humor that would have dissolved a meat axe, they lacked illusions, about anything. If a reporter thought he saw glimmerings of human decency in a politician or a lawyer, he would have his eyes checked.
Continue reading “God’s Knights of the Pen and Bottle: The Noble Reporter in His Splendor”
“I’ve noticed a fascinating phenomenon in my thirty years of teaching: schools and schooling are increasingly irrelevant to the great enterprises of the planet. No one believes anymore that scientists are trained in science classes or politicians in civics classes or poets in English classes. The truth is that schools don’t really teach anything except how to obey orders. This is a great mystery to me because thousands of humane, caring people work in schools as teachers and aides and administrators, but the abstract logic of the institution overwhelms their individual contributions. Although teachers to care and do work very, very hard, the institution is psychopathic — it has no conscience. It rings a bell and the young man in the middle of writing a poem must close his notebook and move to a different cell where he must memorize that humans and monkeys derive from a common ancestor.”
John Taylor Gatto, Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Education
“In our secular society, school has become the replacement for church, and like church it requires that its teachings must be taken on faith.”
John Taylor Gatto
“To fill the young of the species with knowledge and awaken their intelligence… Nothing could be further from the truth. The aim… is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same level, to breed and train a standardized citizenry, to put down dissent and originality. That is its aim in the United States… and that is its aim everywhere else.
(writing of public education in the April 1924 The American Mercury)”
H.L. Mencken
“Public education does not serve a public. It creates a public. And in creating the right kind of public, the schools contribute toward strengthening the spiritual basis of the American Creed. That is how Jefferson understood it, how Horace Mann understood it, how John Dewey understood it, and in fact, there is no other way to understand it. The question is not, Does or doesn’t public schooling create a public? The question is, What kind of public does it create? A conglomerate of self-indulgent consumers? Angry, soulless, directionless masses? Indifferent, confused citizens? Or a public imbued with confidence, a sense of purpose, a respect for learning, and tolerance? The answer to this question has nothing whatever to do with computers, with testing, with teacher accountability, with class size, and with the other details of managing schools. The right answer depends on two things, and two things alone: the existence of shared narratives and the capacity of such narratives to provide an inspired reason for schooling.”
Neil Postman, The End of Education: Redefining the Value of School
“There are three types of lies — lies, damn lies, and statistics.” – Benjamin Disraeli
Every month the government apparatchiks at the Bureau of Lies and Scams (BLS) dutifully announces inflation is still running below 2%. Janet Yellen then gives a speech where she notes her concern inflation is too low and she needs to keep interest rates near zero to save humanity from the scourge of too low inflation. I don’t know how I could survive without 2% inflation reducing my purchasing power.
This week they reported year over year inflation of 1.9%. Just right to keep Janet from raising rates and keeping the stock market on track for new record highs. According to our beloved bureaucrats, after they have sliced, diced, massaged and manipulated the data, you’ve experienced annual inflation of 2.1% since 2000. If you believe that, I’ve got a great real estate deal for you in North Korea on the border with South Korea.
Henry Louis (H.L.) Mencken was perhaps America’s most outspoken defender of liberty in the first half of the 20th Century. And a major theme of his writings was that “Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under.”
It is worth remembering some of the reasons he gave for that shame, since, by the same standards, the government is even more shameful today than when Mencken wrote.
The basis justifying shame in our government lies in the appropriate role of government:
“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.”
“The larger the mob, the harder the test. In small areas, before small electorates, a first-rate man occasionally fights his way through, carrying even the mob with him by force of his personality. But when the field is nationwide, and the fight must be waged chiefly at second and third hand…then all the odds are on the man who is, intrinsically, the most devious and mediocre— the man who can most easily and adeptly disperse the notion that his mind is a virtual vacuum.”
H L Mencken