Famous Quotes & Sayings

H. L. Mencken

Liberals have many tails and chase them all.

H. L. Mencken

Of government, at least in democratic states, it may be said briefly that it is an agency engaged wholesale, and as a matter of solemn duty, in the performance of acts which all self-respecting individuals refrain from as a matter of common decency.

H. L. Mencken

I believe there is a limit beyond which free speech cannot go, but it's a limit that's very seldom mentioned. It's the point where free speech begins to collide with the right to privacy. I don't think there are any other conditions to free speech. I've got a right to say and believe anything I please, but I haven't got a right to press it on anybody else. .... Nobody's got a right to be a nuisance to his neighbors.

H. L. Mencken

For every problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.

H. L. Mencken

Injustice is relatively easy to bear; what sting is justice.

H. L. Mencken

Creator: A comedian whose audience is afraid to laugh.

H. L. Mencken

I am against slavery simply because I dislike slaves.

H. L. Mencken

Liberty is not for these slaves; I do not advocate inflicting it against their conscience. On the contrary, I am strongly in favor of letting them crawl and grovel all they please before whatever fraud or combination of frauds they choose to venerate...Our whole practical government is grounded in mob psychology and the Boobus Americanus will follow any command that promises to make him safer.

H. L. Mencken

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

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.

H. L. Mencken

What I admire most in any man is a serene spirit, a steady freedom from moral indignation, and all-embracing tolerance--in brief,what is commonly called sportsmanship.

H. L. Mencken

We must be willing to pay a price for freedom.

H. L. Mencken

A professional politician is a professionally dishonorable man. In order to get anywhere near high office he has to make so many compromises and submit to so many humiliations that he becomes indistinguishable from a streetwalker.

H. L. Mencken

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.

H. L. Mencken

Imagine the Creator as a low comedian, and at once the world becomes explicable.

H. L. Mencken

the average man does not want to be free. he simply wants to be safe.

H. L. Mencken

The cosmos is a gigantic flywheel making 10,000 revolutions per minute. Man is a sick fly taking a dizzy ride on it.

H. L. Mencken

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

H. L. Mencken

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

J. Robert Oppenheimer

There must be no barriers to freedom of inquiry. There is no place for dogma in science. The scientist is free, and must be free to ask any question, to doubt any assertion, to seek for any evidence, to correct any errors. ... Our political life is also predicated on openness. We know that the only way to avoid error is to detect it and that the only way to detect it is to be free to inquire. And we know that as long as men are free to ask what they must, free to say what they think, free to think what they will, freedom can never be lost, and science can never regress.

Georg C. Lichtenberg

What most clearly characterizes true freedom and its true employment is its misemployment.

Friedrich Nietzsche

How is freedom measured, in individuals as in nations? By the resistance which has to be overcome, by the effort it costs to stay aloft. One would have to seek the highest type of free man where the greatest resistance is constantly being overcome: five steps from tyranny, near the threshold of the danger of servitude.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Liberal institutions straightway cease being liberal the moment they are soundly established: Once this is attained, no more grievous and more thorough enemies of freedom exist than liberal institutions.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Democratic institutions form a system of quarantine for tyrannical desires.

Gerald R. Ford

We must introduce a new balance in the relationship between the individual and the government--a balance that favors greater individual freedom and self-reliance.

Gerald R. Ford

Can a free people restrain crime without sacrificing fundamental liberties and a heritage of compassion?... Let us show that we can temper together those opposite elements of liberty and restraint into one consistent whole. Let us set an example for the world of a law-abiding America glorying in its freedom as well as its respect for law.

Jiddu Krishnamurti

Without total freedom, every perception, every objective regard, is twisted. It is only the man who is totally free who can look and understand immediately. Freedom implies really, doesn't it, the total emptying of the mind. Completely to empty the whole content of the mind-that is real freedom. Freedom is not mere revolt from circumstances, which again breeds other circumstances, other environmental influences, which enslave the mind. We are talking about a freedom that comes naturally, easily, unasked for, when the mind is capable of functioning at its highest level.

Jiddu Krishnamurti

I have only one purpose: to make people free, to urge them towards freedom, to help them to break away from all limitations, for that alone will give them eternal happiness, will give them the unconditional realization of Self.

Jiddu Krishnamurti

Enlightenment is an accident, but some activities make you accident-prone.

Jiddu Krishnamurti

Freedom from something is not freedom.

Jiddu Krishnamurti

Here is my secret: I don't mind what happens.

Jiddu Krishnamurti

There are two kinds of freedom: one is the freedom from something, which is a reaction; and the other is not a reaction, it is "being free."

Jiddu Krishnamurti

The guru cannot awaken you; all that he can do is to point out what is.