H. L. Mencken Quotes

Fear has always been the driving force behind all dictators' repression.

Despotism increases in severity with the number of despots; the responsibility is more divided, and the claims are more numerous.

If I have to shoot 200,000 students to save China from another 100 years of disorder, so be it.

There is fascism, leading only into the blackness which it has chosen as its symbol, into smartness and yapping out of orders, and self-righteous brutality, into social as well as international war. It means change without hope. Our immediate duty - in that tinkering which is the only useful form of action in our leaky old tub - our immediate duty is to stop it.

Every tyrant who has lived has believed in freedom for himself.

Tyranny naturally arises out of democracy.

This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when he first appears he is a protector.

I've played so many historical characters because most horrible dictators are short, fat, middle-aged men.

Concentrated power is not rendered harmless by the good intentions of those who create it.

Brutal men with unlimited power are the same all over the world.

Despotism isn't nearly as bad as it's cracked up to be.

If you give human beings power over others, their natural tendency is to be fascists.

One Hundred and Seventy Three Despots would surely be as oppressive as one.

In domestic as in political tyranny, the case of absolute monsters chiefly illustrates the institution by showing that there is scarcely any horror which may not occur under it if the despot pleases

It is a favorite maxim of despotick power, that mankind are not made to govern themselves.

That's how dictators get started.

One need only watch totalitarians at work to see that once men gain power over other men’s minds, that power is never used sparingly and wisely, but lavishly and brutally and with unspeakable results.

I believe Donald Trump is a bona fide authoritarian. I am deeply concerned that if he were president of the United States, he would act accordingly.

Dictators free themselves by enslaving others. They work not for your benefit, but their own.

Revolution is engendered by an indignation with tyranny, yet is itself pregnant with tyranny.... An attempt to scrutinize men's thoughts and punish their opinions is of all kinds of despotism the most odious: yet this is peculiarly character of a period of revolution.... There is no period more at war with the existence of liberty.

Tyranny is Tyranny, let it come from whom it may.

The most insupportable of tyrants exclaim against the exercise of arbitrary power.

Despotism sits nowhere so secure as under the effigy and ensigns of freedom.

An autocratic system of coercion, in my opinion, soon degenerates. For force always attracts men of low morality, and I believe it to be an invariable rule that tyrants of genius are succeeded by scoundrels. For this reason I have always been passionately opposed to systems such as we see in Italy and Russia to-day.

Flee the country where a lone man holds all power: It is a nation of slaves.