A good politician is quite as unthinkable as an honest burglar.
Interpretation
The quote suggests that finding a genuinely good politician is as unlikely as finding an honest burglar.
H. L. Mencken's quote draws a parallel between the perceived moral failings of politicians and burglars, implying that just as we cannot expect a burglar to be honest, we should not expect politicians to be truly good. The hyperbolic comparison underscores a deep skepticism about the integrity of political figures, reflecting a common belief that power often corrupts and compromises moral character.
In practice
During a political debate, to highlight the challenges of trust in politicians.
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.
I don't approve of the notion that we should be announcing who should step down from the position of a head of a state unless we are seriously prepared to remove that person. But if we are not, if we are being prudent and careful, then let's also be careful with how we talk.
We've come to be consumed by a 24-hour, slash-and-burn, negative ad, bickering, small-minded politics that doesn't move us forward. Sometimes one side is up and the other side is down. But there's no sense that they are coming together in a common-sense, practical, nonideological way to solve the problems that we face.
Scotland is not a region of the U.K.; Scotland is a nation, and if we cannot protect our interests within a U.K. that is going to be changing fundamentally, then that right of Scotland to consider the options of independence has to be there.
Public opinion in Egypt is very antagonistic to the way the dictatorship, Mubarak dictatorship, interpreted relations with Israel. Very antagonistic.
We used to play marbles for keeps. If you lost, you lost. It is the same way with politics, but not everybody knows this.
Every provisional political set-up following a revolution requires a dictatorship, and an energetic dictatorship at that.
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