When fanatics are on top there is no limit to oppression.
Interpretation
The unchecked power of fanatics can lead to extreme oppression without limits.
H. L. Mencken's quote highlights the dangers posed by fanatical ideologies, especially when they gain power. In such situations, there is often a relentless pursuit of control and dominance, resulting in the subjugation of dissenting voices and minority perspectives, reflecting a profound threat to freedom and human rights.
In practice
During a lecture about political structures, this quote can be used to discuss the impact of fanaticism on societies.
I know a good many men of great learning-that is, men born with an extraordinary eagerness and capacity to acquire knowledge. One and all, they tell me that they can't recall learning anything of any value in school. All that schoolmasters managed to accomplish with them was to test and determine the amount of knowledge that they had already acquired independently-and not infrequently the determination was made clumsily and inaccurately.
It takes a long while for a naturally trustful person to reconcile himself to the idea that after all God will not help him
It is the theory of all modern civilized governments that they protect and foster the liberty of the citizen; it is the practice of all of them to limit its exercise, and sometimes very narrowly.
The central belief of every moron is that he is the victim of a mysterious conspiracy against his common rights and true deserts.
The cure for the evils of democracy is more democracy.
It is my conviction that no normal man ever fell in love, within the ordinary meaning of the term, after the age of thirty.
The two systems slave and free-labor are incompatible. They have never permanently existed together in one country, and they never can.
As many arrows, loosed several ways, come to one mark...so many a thousand actions, once afoot, end in one purpose.
Spiritual life can certainly follow the pattern one sees in the fake martial arts, with most teachers making nebulous and magical claims that never get tested, while their students derange themselves with weird ideas, empty rituals, and other affectations.
Never again will you be capable of ordinary human feeling. Everything will be dead inside you. Never again will you be capable of love, or friendship, or joy of living, or laughter, or curiosity, or courage, or integrity. You will be hollow. We shall squeeze you empty and then we shall fill you with ourselves.
It is those pent-up, craving children who make all the wars and all the horrors and all the art and all the beauty and discovery in life, because they are trying to achieve what lay beyond their grasp before they were five years old.
Life is infinitely stranger than anything which the mind of man could invent.
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