H. L. Mencken Quotes About Enemies

• 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.

  H. L. Mencken

  Taken, Responsibility, Men

• The state remains, as it was in the beginning, the common enemy of all well-disposed, industrious and decent men.

  H. L. Mencken

  Men, Enemy, Politics

• All government is, in its essence, 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

  Men, Essence, Voting

  "The Constitution". Baltimore Evening Sun, August 19, 1935.

• No professional politician is ever actually in favor of public economy. It is his implacable enemy, and he knows it. All professional politicians are dedicated wholeheartedly to waste and corruption. They are the enemies of every decent man.

  H. L. Mencken

  Men, Enemy, Favors

  "Minority Report: H.L. Mencken's Notebooks". Book by H. L. Mencken, 204, 1956.

• I have long been convinced that the idea of liberty is abhorrent to most human beings. What they want is security, not freedom. Thus it seldom causes any public indignation when an enterprising tyrant claps down on one of his enemies. To most men it seems a natural proceeding.

  H. L. Mencken

  Men, Tyrants, Ideas

• The more noisy Negro leaders, by depicting all whites as natural and implacable enemies to their race, have done it a great disservice. Large numbers of whites who were formerly very
  friendly to it, and willing to go to great lengths to help it, are now resentful and suspicious.

  H. L. Mencken

  Numbers, Race, Leader

  H.L. Mencken (2013). “Minority Report”, p.213, Knopf

• When you sympathize with a married woman you either make two enemies or gain one wife and one friend.

  H. L. Mencken

  Sympathy, Women, Two

  H.L. Mencken (2012). “Mencken Chrestomathy”, p.620, Vintage

• Here is tragedy - and here is America. For the curse of the country, as well of all democracies, is precisely the fact that it treats its best men as enemies. The aim of our society, if it may be said to have an aim, is to iron them out. The ideal American, in the public sense, is a respectable vacuum.

  H. L. Mencken

  Country, Men, Iron

  "More Tips for Novelists". "Chicago Tribune" Newspaper, May 2, 1926.

• Capitalism under democracy has a further advantage: its enemies, even when it is attacked, are scattered and weak, and it is usually easily able to array one half of them against the other half, and thus dispose of both.

  H. L. Mencken

  Democracies Have, Enemy, Democracy

  H. L. Mencken (2013). “Notes On Democracy”, p.50, Read Books Ltd

• Liberty and democracy are eternal enemies, and every one knows it who has ever given any sober reflection to the matter.

  H. L. Mencken

  Reflection, Enemy, Democracy

  "Liberty and Democracy". Baltimore Evening Sun (April 13, 1925) as quoted in "A Second Mencken Chrestomathy: A New Selection from the Writings of America's Legendary Editor, Critic, and Wit" edited by Terry Teachout (p. 35), 1994.

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