I believe in only one thing: liberty; but I do not believe in liberty enough to want to force it upon anyone.
Interpretation
True liberty involves personal choice and cannot be imposed on others.
In this quote, H. L. Mencken expresses a profound belief in the concept of liberty while simultaneously recognizing the importance of individual autonomy. He suggests that while he values freedom highly, he acknowledges that enforcing this freedom on others contradicts the very nature of liberty itself, indicating a philosophical stance on the balance between personal beliefs and mutual respect for individual choices.
In practice
In a speech about personal freedom and societal obligations.
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.
It is very noble hypocrisy not to talk of one's self.
See we just had a misunderstanding. I thought we lived in the U.S. of A., the United States of America. But actually we live in the U.S. of A., the United States of Advertising. Freedom of expression is guaranteed? If you've got the money!
Nothing, absolutely nothing, has a more direct bearing on the moral choices made by individuals or the purposes pursued by society than belief or disbelief in God.
Any necessary truth, whether a priori or a posteriori, could not have turned out otherwise
I thought of the people before me who had looked down at the river and gone to sleep beneath it. I wondered about them. I wondered how they had done it--it, the physical act. I simply wondered about the dead because their days had ended and I did not know how I would get through mine.
What if someone gave a war & Nobody came? / Life would ring the bells of Ecstasy and Forever be Itself again.
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