H. L. Mencken Quotes

People may oppose you, but when they realize you can hurt them, they'll join your side.

I wouldn't play together with someone who likes to control everything like me.

Publishing companies are like schoolyard bullies that can't even fight well.

But I think anybody who believes I could force coach Sloan to resign is crazy. He's stronger than that and personally if I said that to him, he'd probably go tell me to go do something.

Our sense of power is more vivid when we break a man's spirit than when we win his heart.

You can't do anything if a person says no. In such a case, there's nothing you can do - unlike the popular cliche that pressure is exerted, or that maybe an unwilling source is done away with.

Nothing overshadows truth so completely as authority.

vested interest

Telling a man to go to hell and making him go are two different propositions.

It is one thing to persuade, another to command …

Once a person insists on how you are to think he immediately begins to insist on how you are to behave.

Deals, flattery, threats and promises are part of the process, certainly; do not flinch from any opportunity to scheme and plot, however sordid and demeaning it may appear.

… the rich and powerful too often bend the acts of government to their own selfish purposes.

It's in the nature of the Presidency that most of the people youy meet want something.

Information should never be used as a weapon on a team.

I can frighten or buy ninety-nine out of every one hundred men.

It is one thing to persuade, another to command; one thing to press with arguments, another with penalties.

Harassment is about power---the undue exercise of power by a superior over a subordinate.

Children use all their wiles to get their way with adults. Adults do the same with children.

But doesn't it seem like Chelsea's sort of being pimped out in some weird sort of way?

Every economy exists, no matter what the level of democracy, has elements of crony capitalism. It's - given human nature and given the democratic structures, which we all, I assume, adhere to, that is an inevitable consequence.

I will have you removed if you don't stop. I have a little system of my own.

I have with me two gods, Persuasion and Compulsion.

The most important thing about power is to make sure you don't have to use it.

I call the discourse of power any discourse that engenders blame, hence guilt, in its recipient.