Government is actually the worst failure of civilized man. There has never been a really good one, and even those that are most tolerable are arbitrary, cruel, grasping and unintelligent.
Interpretation
The quote critiques government as a fundamental failure of civilization.
H. L. Mencken expresses a deep skepticism toward government, asserting that it has consistently failed to serve humanity effectively. He contends that even the best governments fall short, exhibiting traits of arbitrariness and cruelty, suggesting that the very nature of governance is flawed and often detrimental to society.
In practice
This quote could be used in a political debate to emphasize the failures of current governments.
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.
If you don't like the word 'religion,' you can replace it with 'ideology' - it's largely the same thing. At the heart of both religion and ideology is the question of authority and where authority is coming from.
The state tends to expand in proportion to its means of existence and to live beyond its means, and these are, in the last analysis, nothing but the substance of the people. Woe to the people that cannot limit the sphere of action of the state! Freedom, private enterprise, wealth, happiness, independence, personal dignity, all vanish.
I could safely declare, I am an idealist... I believe in everything - I am only looking for proofs.
Why is the truth, it would seem, revealed to some and not to others? Is there a special organ for receiving revelation from God? Yes, though usually we close it and do not let it open up: Godβs revelation is given to something called a loving heart.
Human life--that appeared to him the one thing worth investigating. Compared to it there was nothing else of any value. It was true that as one watched life in its curious crucible of pain and pleasure, one could not wear over one's face a mask of glass, nor keep the sulphurous fumes from troubling the brain and making the imagination turbid with monstrous fancies and misshapen dreams.
The reader knows the writer better than he knows himself; but the writer's physical presence is light from a star that has moved on.
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