H. L. Mencken Quotes

Truth and, by consequence, liberty, will always be the chief power of honest men.

I have written things that Republicans and Democrats and all kinds of figures have either hated or felt very uncomfortable about. Because in doing these long projects and books, you get close to the bone. And they're not calling me up and asking me for dinner.

In the long run, stability cannot be purchased at the expense of liberty.

write with honesty and don't worry about the feelings of others, because no matter what you say, they'll hate you anyway.

Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can save it; no constitution, no law, no court can even do much to help it.

No man can be just who is not free.

The Democratic Party will never desert the freedoms of our people under the guise of pretending to protect them.

Whenever men take the law into their own hands, the loser is the law. And when the law loses, freedom languishes.

The Constitution gives every American the inalienable right to make a damn fool of himself.

The ultimate good in a liberal state is liberty.

The proper balance between individual liberty and central authority is a very ancient problem.

Liberty is the right of every man to be honest, to think and to speak without hypocrisy.

When we say 'democracy' we have to mean what we say.

I'm a big advocate of freedom: freedom of speech, freedom of expression, freedom of thought.

Liberty has never come from Government. Liberty has always come from the subjects of it. The history of liberty is a history of limitations of governmental power, not the increase of it.

How far are we to go in pursuit of greater security at the cost of essential liberties?

The liberal, emphasizing the civil and property rights of the individual, insists that the individual must remain so supreme as to make the state his servant.

I am unable to agree that the benefits that may accrue to society from the compulsory flag-salute are sufficiently definite and tangible to justify the invasion of freedom and privacy that is entailed ...

Even if a person is doing nothing wrong, in a free society, that person shouldn’t have to justify every action that government officials might view as suspicious. A key component of freedom is not having to worry about how to explain oneself all the time.

Government's first duty is to protect the people, not run their lives

If you aren't free to protect yourself when the government puts its thumb on that freedom, then you're not free at all.

Liberalism has become a special kind of stupid.

I have a personal belief that you never have to give up liberty for security. You can still provide security without sacrificing our Bill of Rights.

Liberty is the very last idea that seems to occur to anybody, in considering any political or social proposal. It is only necessary for anybody for any reason to allege any evidence of any evil in any human practice, for people instantly to suggest that the practice should be suppressed by the police.

Integrity can be neither lost nor concealed nor faked nor quenched nor artificially come by nor outlived, nor, I believe, in the long run, denied.