"Under democracy one party always devotes its chief energies to trying to prove that the other party is unfit to rule--and both commonly succeed, and are right... The United States has never developed an aristocracy really disinterested or an intelligentsia really intelligent. Its history is simply a record of vacillations between two gangs of frauds."



"I believe in only one thing: liberty; but I do not believe in liberty enough to want to force it upon anyone. That is, I am nothing of the reformer, however much I may rant against this or that great curse or malaise. In that ranting there is usually far more delight than indignation."
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"My literary theory, like my politics, is based chiefly on one main idea, to wit, the idea of freedom. I am, in brief, a libertarian of the most extreme variety, and know of no human right that is one tenth as valuable as the simple right to utter what seems (at the moment) to be the truth. Take away this right and none other is worth a hoot..."

"Democracy is also a form of worship. It is the worship of Jackals by Jackasses."

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"(T)he iconoclast proves enough when he proves by his blasphemy that this or that idol is defectively convincing."

"The average man does not get pleasure out of an idea because he thinks it is true; he thinks it is true because he gets pleasure out of it."
"Every election is a sort of advance auction sale of stolen goods."

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"What the common man longs for in this world, before and above all his other longings, is the simplest and most ignominious sort of peace - the peace of a trusty in a well-managed penitentiary. He is willing to sacrifice everything else to it. He puts it above his dignity and he puts it above his pride. Above all, he puts it above his liberty. The Fact, perhaps, explains his veneration for policemen, in all the forms they take - his belief that there is a mysterious sanctity in law, however absurd it may be in fact. A policeman is a charlatan who offers, in return for obedience, to protect him (a)from his superiors, (b)from his equals, and (c) from himself. This last service, under democracy, is commonly the most esteemed of them all. In the United States, at least theoretically, it is the only thing that keeps ice-wagon drivers, Y.M.C.A. secretaries, insurance collectors, and other such human camels from smoking opium, ruining themselves in the night clubs, and going to Palm Beach with Follies girls. It is a democratic invention. Here, though the common man is deceived, he starts from a sound premise: to wit, that liberty, is something too hot for his hands - or, as Nietzsche put it, too cold for his spine."

Notes on Democracy

"The atom bomb, I have long preached, is the greatest invention that Yahweh has made since leprosy. Certainly it has given great glory to the Christian physicists of this country. Try to imagine a decent cannibal throwing it on a town full of women and children."

"Every government is a scoundrel. In its relations with other governments it resorts to frauds and barbarities that were prohibited to private men by the Common Law of civilization so long ago as the reign of Hammurabi, and in its dealings with its own people it not only steals and wastes their property and plays a brutal and witless game with their natural rights, but regularly gambles with their very lives. Wars are seldom caused by spontaneous hatreds between people, for peoples in general are too ignorant of one another to have grievances and too indifferent to what goes on beyond their borders to plan conquests. They must be urged to the slaughter by politicians who know how to alarm them."

"Happiness, as I have encountered it in this world, consists chiefly in getting no more than what one wants and wanting no more than one can get... The prudent man tries to mold his desires to the probabilities, or, at all events, to the possibilities."

"When a new source of taxation is found it never means, in practice, that an old source is abandoned. It merely means that the politicians have two ways of milking the taxpayer where they had only one before."

"The allurement that women hold out to men is precisely the allurement that Cape Hatteras holds out to sailors: They are enormously dangerous and hence enormously fascinating."

"When you hear a man speak of his love for his country, it is a sign that he expects to be paid for it."

"It is the theory of all modern civilized governments that they protect and foster the liberty of the citizen; it is the practice of all of them to limit its exercise, and sometimes very narrowly."
 
"The United States, to my eye, is incomparably the greatest show on earth . . . we have 
clowns among us who are as far above the clowns of any other great state as Jack Dempsey 
is above the paralytic - and not a few dozen or score of them, but whole droves and 
herds."

"No one ever heard of the truth being enforced by law. When the secular is called in to 
sustain an idea, whether new or old, it is always a bad idea, and not infrequently it is 
downright idiotic."

"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."
"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."
 
"The older I grow the more I distrust the familiar doctrine that age brings wisdom."
"Is a young man bound to serve his country in war? In addition to his legal duty there is perhaps also a moral duty, but it is very obscure. What is called his country is only its government and that government consists merely of professional politicians, a parasitical and anti-social class of men. They never sacrifice themselves for their country. They make all wars, but very few of them ever die in one. If it is the duty of a young man to serve his country under all circumstances then it is equally the duty of an enemy young man to serve his. Thus we come to a moral contradiction and absurdity so obvious that even clergymen and editorial writers sometimes notice it."

Minority Report
"Samuel Johnson's saying that patriotism is the last refuge of scoundrels has some truth in it but not nearly enough. Patriotism, in truth, is the great nursery of scoundrels, and its annual output is probably greater than that of even religion. Its chief glories are the demagogue, the military bully, and the spreaders of libels and false history. Its philosophy rests firmly on the doctrine that the end justifies the means--that any blow, whether above or below the belt, is fair against dissenters from its wholesale denial of plain facts."
"It is a fine thing to face machine guns for immortality and a medal, but isn't it a fine thing too, to face calumny, injustice and loneliness for the truth which makes men free?"
"The kind of man who wants the government to adopt and enforce his ideas is always the kind of man whose ideas are idiotic."
"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 objection to Puritans is not that they try to make us think as they do, but that they try to make us do as they think."
"To die for an idea: it is unquestionably noble. But how much nobler it would be if men died for ideas that were true."
"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."
"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."

Baltimore Evening Sun on 26 July 1920

"I believe that liberty is the only genuinely valuable thing that men have invented, at least in the field of government, in a thousand years. I believe that it is better to be free than to be not free, even when the former is dangerous and the latter safe. I believe that the finest qualities of man can flourish only in free air -- that progress made under the shadow of the policeman's club is false progress, and of no permanent value. 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."
"Historian; an unsuccessful novelist."
"It is not a sign of communal well-being when men turn to their government to execute all their business for them, but rather a sign of decay, as in the United States today." [1927]
"...(W)ars are not made by common folk, scratching for livings in the heat of the day; they are made by demagogues infesting palaces." 
"All men are frauds. The only difference between them is that some admit it. I myself deny it."
"(D)emocracy may be a self-limiting disease, like measles. It is, perhaps, something more: it is self-devouring. One cannot observe it objectively without being impressed by its curious distrust of itself - its apparently ineradicable tendency to abandon its whole philosophy at the first sign of strain. I need not point to what happens invariably in democratic states when the national safety is menaced. * All the great tribunes of democracy, on such occasions, convert themselves, by a process as simple as taking a deep breath, into despots of an almost fabulous ferocity."

from 'Politics', in 'The American Scene, A Reader' Knopf, 1965, p. 234-235

* "Americans don't need a Big Brother to read all their e-mail, to track of all of their medical records, and to know everything that they're doing." John Ashcroft, 1997
"The average man's love of liberty is nine-tenths imaginary, exactly like his love of sense, justice and truth. He is not actually happy when free; he is uncomfortable, a bit alarmed, and intolerably lonely. Liberty is not a thing for the great masses of men. It is the exclusive possession of a small and disreputable minority, like knowledge, courage and honor. It takes a special sort of man to understand and enjoy liberty -- and he is usually an outlaw in democratic societies. It is, indeed, only the exceptional man who can even stand it. The average man doesn't want to be free. He simply wants to be safe."

"The notion that a radical is one who hates his country is naive and usually idiotic. He is, more likely, one who likes his country more than the rest of us, and is thus more disturbed than the rest of us when he sees it debauched. He is not a bad citizen turning to crime; he is a good citizen driven to despair."
 
"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."

"The only way to success in American public life lies in flattering and kowtowing to the mob."
"Half the sorrows of the world, I suppose, are caused by making false assumptions. ... (A great) increase (in human happiness) would follow if the American people could only rid themselves of (the) false assumption that still rides them - one that corrupts all their thinking about the great business of politics, and vastly augments their discontent and unhappiness - the assumption, that is, that politicians are divided into two classes, and that one of these classes is made up of good ones. (T)his assumption is almost universally held among us. Our whole politics, indeed, is based upon it, and has been based upon it since the earliest days. What is any political campaign save a concerted effort to turn out a set of politicians who are admittedly bad and put in a set who are thought to be better? The former assumption, I believe, is always sound; the latter is just as certainly false. For if experience teaches us anything at all it teaches us this: that a good politician, under democracy, is quite as unthinkable as an honest burglar."

from 'Politics', in 'The American Scene, A Reader' Knopf, 1965, p. 217-218
"The argument that capital punishment degrades the state is moonshine, for if that were true then it would degrade the state to send men to war... The state, in truth, is degraded in its very nature: a few butcheries cannot do it any further damage."
 
"It is the dull man who is always sure, and the sure man who is always dull."
"There's no underestimating the intelligence of the American public."
 
"The taste for gambling, like that for sports, is a kind of feeble-mindedness--maybe even an 
insanity. It can be justified only by a resort to the most preposterous sophistry. Whenever it 
has seized a man of any visible talent--for example, Dostoevsky and C. C. Colton-- he has ended 
crazy. It is the silliest of all the vices."

"Wars will never cease until babies come into the world with larger cerebrums and smaller adrenal glands."

"To wage a war for a purely moral reason is as absurd as to ravish a woman for a purely moral reason."

"Injustice is relatively easy to bear; what stings is justice."

"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."

"It [the State] has taken on a vast mass of new duties and responsibilities; it has spread out its powers until they penetrate to every act of the citizen, however secret; it has begun to throw around its operations the high dignity and impeccability of a State religion; its agents become a separate and superior caste, with authority to bind and loose, and their thumbs in every pot. But it still remains, as it was in the beginning, the common enemy of all well-disposed, industrious and decent men." (1926) quoted in Albert J. Nock's "Our Enemey the State"

Archbishop: A Christian ecclesiastic of a rank superior to that attained by Christ.

Pastor: One employed by the wicked to prove to them by his example that virtue doesn't pay.

Experience: A series of failures. Every failure teaches a man something, to wit, that he will probably fail again.

Self-respect: the secure feeling that no one, as yet, is suspicious.

"The difference between a moral man and a man of honor is that the latter regrets a discreditable act, even when it has worked and he has not been caught."

"Every step in human progress, from the first feeble stirrings in the abyss of time, has been opposed by the great majority of men. Every valuable thing that has been added to the store of man's possessions has been derided by them when it was new, and destroyed by them when they had the power. They have fought every new truth ever heard of, and they have killed every truth-seeker who got into their hands."

"The saddest life is that of a political aspirant under democracy. His failure is ignominious and his success disgraceful."

"If a politician found he had cannibals among his constituents, he would promise them missionaries for dinner."

"The cynics are right nine times out of ten."

"Friendship is a common belief in the same fallacies, mountebanks and hobgoblins."
 
"For every complex problem there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong."
 
"Conscience is a mother-in-law whose visit never ends."

"The most costly of all follies is to believe passionately in the palpably not true. It is the chief occupation of mankind."

"Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard."

"To propose that marriage be abandoned and half-marriage substituted is like advising a man with a sty to get a glass eye. He doesn't want a glass eye; he wants his own natural and perfect eye, with the sty plucked out. All such reformers forget that the real essence of marriage is not the nature of the relation but the performance of that relation. It is a device for time-binding, like every other basic human institution. Its one indomitable purpose is to endure. Plainly enough, divorce ought to be easy when the destruction of a marriage is an accomplished fact, but it would be folly to set up conditions tending to make that destruction more likely. Too much, indeed, has been done in that direction already. The way out for people who are incapable of the concessions and compromises that go with every contract is not to fill the contract with snakes but to avoid it altogether. There are, indeed, many men and women to whom marriage is a sheer psychic impossibility. But to the majority it is surely not. They find it quite bearable; they like it; they want it to endure. What they need is help in making it endurable."
 
"Divorce" The New York World, Jan 26, 1930

"It is hard to believe that a man is telling the truth when you know that you would lie if you were in his place."

"Government, in its very essence, is opposed to all increase in knowledge. Its tendency is always towards permanence and against change...[T]he progress of humanity, far from being the result of government, has been made entirely without its aid and in the face if its constant and bitter opposition."

"It is my belief, as a friendly neutral in all such high and ghostly matters, that the body of doctrine known as Modernism is completely incompatible, not only with anything rationally describable as Christianity, but also with anything deserving to pass as religion in general. Religion, if it is to retain any genuine significance, can never be reduced to a series of sweet attitudes, possible to anyone not actually in jail for felony. It is, on the contrary, a corpus of powerful and profound convictions, many of them not open to logical analysis. . . .What the Modernists have done . . . [is] to get rid of all the logical difficulties of religion, and yet preserve a generally pious cast of mind. It is a vain enterprise. What they have left, once they have achieved their imprudent scavenging, is hardly more than a row of hollow platitudes, as empty [of] psychological force and effect as so many nursery rhymes. . . . Religion is something else again - in Henrik Ibsen's phrase, something far more deep - down - diving and mud - upbringing. Dr. Machen tried to impress that obvious fact upon his fellow adherents of the Geneva Muhammad [i.e., Calvin]. He failed - but he was undoubtedly right."

H. L. Mencken, "Dr. Fundamentalis", an obituary of Rev. J. Gresham Machen, Baltimore Evening Sun (January 18, 1937), 2nd Section, p. 15.

"Don't over estimate the decency of the human race."

"On one issue at least, men and women agree; they both distrust women."

"Complete masculinity and stupidity are often indistinguishable."

"Opera in English is, in the main, just about as sensible as baseball in Italian."

"The first Rotarian was the first man to call John the Baptist "Jack"."

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

"There are two kinds of books: those that no one reads and those that no one ought to read."

"If I ever marry it will be on a sudden impulse, as a man shoots himself."

"Why authors write I do not know. As well ask why a hen lays an egg or a cow stands patiently while a farmer burglarizes her."

"We are here and it is now. Further than that all human knowledge is moonshine."

"I never lecture, not because I am shy or a bad speaker, but simply because I detest the sort of people who go to lectures and don't want to meet them."

"It is impossible to imagine Goethe or Beethoven being good at billiards or golf."

"Before a man speaks, it is always safe to assume that he is a fool. After he speaks it is seldom necessary to assume."

"A great nation is any mob of people which produces at least one honest man a century."

"But let us not forget that it (Lincoln's Gettysburg Address) is poetry, not logic; beauty, not sense. Think of the argument in it. Put it into the cold words of everyday. The doctrine is simply this: that the Union soldiers who died at Gettysburg sacrificed their lives to the cause of self - determination -- "that government of the people, by the people, for the people," should not perish from the earth. It is difficult to imagine anything more untrue. The Union soldiers in that battle actually fought against self - determination; it was the Confederates who fought for the right of their people to govern themselves. What was the practical effect of the battle of Gettysburg? What else than the destruction of the old sovereignty of the States, i.e., of the people of the States? The Confederates went into battle free;they came out with their freedom subject to the supervision and veto of the rest of the country - and for nearly twenty years that veto was so effective that they enjoyed scarcely more liberty, in the political sense, than so many convicts in the penitentiary."
 

"Some immemorial imbecilities have been added deliberately, on the ground that it is just as interesting to note how foolish men have been as to note how wise they have been."

A New Dictionary of Quotations (1942) p. 8

"The world always makes the assumption that the exposure of an error is identical with the discovery of truth - that the error and truth are simply opposite. They are nothing of the sort. What the world turns to, when it is cured on one error, is usually simply another error, and maybe one worse than the first one."

"Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance."

"A judge is a law student who marks his own examination papers."

"Psychology: The theory that the patient will probably get well anyhow, and is certainly a damned fool."

"Truth would quickly cease to become stranger than fiction, once we got as used to it."

"It is the fundamental theory of all the more recent American law...that the average citizen is half-witted, and hence not to be trusted to either his own devices or his own thoughts."

"It is inaccurate to say I hate everything. I am strongly in favor of common sense, common honesty, and common decency. This makes me forever ineligible for public office."

"The only good bureaucrat is one with a pistol at his head. Put it in his hand and it's good-by to the Bill of Rights."

"We suffer most when the White House busts with ideas."

"The New Deal began, like the Salvation Army, by promising to save humanity. It ended, again like the Salvation Army, by running flop-houses and disturbing the peace."

"Beware of all politicians at all times, but beware of them most sharply when they talk of reforming and improving the constitution."

"Most people want security in this world, not liberty."

"What men value in this world is not rights but privileges."

"Demagogue: One who preaches doctrines he knows to be untrue to men he knows to be idiots."

"In this world of sin and sorrow there is always something to be thankful for. As for me, I rejoice that I am not a Republican."

"The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule."

"Jury - A group of 12 people, who, having lied to the judge about their health, hearing, and business engagements, have failed to fool him."

"The theory seems to be that so long as a man is a failure he is one of God's chillun, but that as soon as he succeeds he is taken over by the Devil."

"Hanging one scoundrel, it appears, does not deter the next. Well, what of it? The first one is at least disposed of."

"A man may be a fool and not know it - but not if he is married."

"The American people, North and South, went into the {Civil} war as citizens of their respective states, they came out as subjects...And what they thus lost they have never got back."

"An idealist is one who, on noticing that a rose smells better than a cabbage, concludes that it will make better soup."

"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."

"The government consists of a gang of men exactly like you and me. They have, taking one with another, no special talent for the business of government; they have only a talent for getting and holding office. Their principal device to that end is to search out groups who pant and pine for something they can't get and to promise to give it to them. Nine times out of ten that promise is worth nothing. The tenth time it is made good by looting A to satisfy B. In other words, government is a broker in pillage, and every election is sort of an advance auction sale of stolen goods."

"A celebrity is one who is known by many people he is glad he doesn't know."

"I am free to all prejudices. I hate everyone equally."

"Immortality is the condition of a dead man who doesn't believe that he is dead."

"It is even harder for the average ape to believe that he has descended from man."

"Love is the triumph of imagination over intelligence."

"Marriage is a wonderful institution - but who would want to live in an institution?"

"There is no dull subjects. There are only dull writers."

"The men the American people admire most extravagantly are the most daring liars; the men they detest most violently are those who try to tell them the truth."

"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 a standard citizenry, to put down dissent and originality."

"People constantly speak of 'the government' doing this or that, as they might speak of God doing it. But the government is really nothing but a group of men, and usually they are very inferior men."

"A cynic is a man who, when he smells flowers, looks around for a coffin."

"We must respect the other fellow's religion, but only in the sense and to the extent that we respect his theory that his wife is beautiful and his children are smart."