A great nation is any mob of people which produces at least one honest man a century.
Interpretation
A great nation can be defined by the presence of integrity among its people.
H. L. Mencken's quote suggests that the moral fabric of a society can be gauged by the existence of individuals who exhibit honesty and integrity. Even if only a few such people emerge over the course of a century, it reflects positively on the nation as a whole and underscores the importance of ethical conduct in the broader context of societal values.
In practice
A keynote speech about the importance of honesty in governance could use this quote.
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.
A system of limitless individual choices, with respect to communications, is not necessarily in the interest of citizenship and self-government.
To humiliate and be humiliated, I think, is a crucial element in our whole social structure. It's not only the artist I'm sorry for. It's just that I know exactly where he feels most humiliated.
There is a beauty in discovery. There is mathematics in music, a kinship of science and poetry in the description of nature, and exquisite form in a molecule. Attempts to place different disciplines in different camps are revealed as artificial in the face of the unity of knowledge. All literate men are sustained by the philosopher, the historian, the political analyst, the economist, the scientist, the poet, the artisan and the musician.
All the higher life forms scythed away, just like that. [ . . . ] Nothing but dust and fundamentalists.
The greatest enemy of individual freedom is the individual himself.
There is no single face in nature, because every eye that looks upon it, sees it from its own angle. So every man's spice-box seasons his own food.
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