H. L. Mencken Quotes

Authority poisons everybody who takes authority on himself.

There's a certain amount of tyranny in all of us to some extent, and in some people it's much more developed than in others. It's a different balance which makes us all different.

I have never been able to conceive how any rational being could propose happiness to himself from the exercise of power over others.

If you think of yourselves as helpless and ineffectual, it is certain that you will create a despotic government to be your master. The wise despot, therefore, maintains among his subjects a popular sense that they are helpless and ineffectual.

All men would be tyrants if they could.

Power does not corrupt. Fear corrupts... perhaps the fear of a loss of power.

Shakespeare reveals human nature brilliantly: he shines a light on our instinctive desire to dominate each other.

Power over others is weakness disguised as strength.

The tyrant is only the slave turned inside out.

Each new power won by man is a power over man as well.

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

No man ever ruled other men for their own good.

Next to enjoying ourselves, the next greatest pleasure consists in preventing others from enjoying themselves, or, more generally, in the acquisition of power.

Power is domination, control, and therefore a very selective form of truth which is a lie.

Give a man a free hand and he'll try to put it all over you.

The strength and power of despotism consists wholly in the fear of resistance.

You carry forever the fingerprint that comes from being under someone's thumb.

The need to exert power, when thwarted in the open fields of life, is the more likely to assert itself in trifles.

The bulk of mankind have indeed, in all countries in their turn, been made the prey of ambition.

Their authority over their slaves renders them vain and imperious.

Power, whether vested in many or a few, is ever grasping, and like the grave, cries, "Give, give!

Watch out for the man who talks of putting things in order. Putting things in order always means getting other people under your control.

There is no more contemptible poison than power over one's fellow men.

Power corrupts; but absolute power is really neat.

Wild beasts hate nets, and people hate their superiors.