D

• To steal from one person is theft. To steal from many is taxation.
• When Barbary Pirates demand a fee for allowing you to do business, it's called 'tribute money.' When the Mafia demands a fee for allowing you to do business, it's called 'the protection racket.' When the state demands a fee for allowing you to do business, it's called 'sales tax.'

• Get the thing straight once and for all. The police are not here to create disorder. The police are here to preserve disorder.

• Any pitcher who throws at a batter and deliberately tries to hit him is a Communist.

• I do not consider it an insult, but rather a compliment to be called an agnostic. I do not pretend to know where many ignorant men are sure--that is all agnosticism means.
• I am a friend of the working man, and I would rather be his friend than be one.

• For my part I would as soon be descended from a baboon ... as from a savage who delights to torture his enemies ... treats his wives like slaves ... and is haunted by the grossest superstitions.
• Any animal whatever, endowed with well-marked social instincts, would inevitably acquire a moral sense or conscience, as soon as its intellectual powers had become as well developed, or nearly as well developed, as in man.

• Never be haughty to the humble; never be humble to the haughty.
• All we ask is to be let alone.

• The percentage of the national effort which is spent on preparation for war may be indicative of the moral decadence of any civilization.

• I am not one of those who do not believe in love at first sight, but I believe in taking a second look.

• We talk of our mastery of nature, which sounds very grand; but the fact is we respectfully adapt ourselves, first, to her ways.

• The master class has always declares the war; the subject class has always fought the battles.
• The economic owning class is always the political ruling class.
• The army chaplain is one of the interesting by-products of war. He is a shining example of Christian patriotism--praying for war, shouting for war, thirsting for blood and "ministering" to the soldier boy with his legs shot off ... The Christian army chaplain prays to his Christian God to bless and prosper the killing business on his side of the line, and to have no mercy on his Christian brothers on the other side, whose Christian army chaplain is praying to the same Christian God at the same time to bless and prosper them in the same infernal business.
• Do not worry over the charge of treason to your masters but be concerned with the treason that involves yourself.

• Progress is nothing but the victory of laughter over dogma.

Voltarine De Cleyre

• Make no laws whatever concerning speech, and speech will be free; so soon as you make a declaration on paper that speech shall be free, you will have a hundred lawyers proving that "freedom does not mean abuse, nor liberty license;" and they will define and define freedom out of existence.

• How can you be expected to govern a country that has two hundred and forty-six kinds of cheese?
• In order to become the master, the politician poses as the servant.

• Nice guys finish last.

• (Celibacy)... the worst form of self-abuse.
• The idea of a Supreme Being who creates a world in which one creature is designed to eat another in order to subsist, and then passes a law saying "Thou shalt not kill," is so monstrously, immeasurably, bottomlessly absurd that I am at a loss to understand how mankind has entertained or given it house room all this long.

• Every woman should marry--and no man.

• The animals are not as stupid as one thinks--they have neither doctors nor lawyers.

• I'm running for president of the United States because I believe that--with strong leadership--America's days will always lie ahead of us. Just as they lie ahead of us now.

• Where would Christianity be if Jesus got eight to fifteen years, with time off for good behavior?

• A gentleman will not insult me, and no man not a gentleman can insult me.
• If there is no struggle there is no progress. Those who profess to freedom and yet deprecate agitation are men who want crops without plowing. They want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its mighty waters. This struggle may be a moral one, or it may be physical, but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what people will submit to, and you have found out the exact amount of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them; and these will continue till they have resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they suppress.For a white man to defend his friend unto blood is praiseworthy but for a black man to do precisely the same thing is a crime. It was glorious for Americans to drench the soil and crimson the sea with blood to escape payment of threepenny tax upon tea; but it is a crime to shoot down a monster in defense of the liberty of a black man and to save him from bondage one minute of which (in the language of Jefferson) is worse than ages of that which our fathers rose in rebellion to oppose.

• A democracy is a government that must respond to the majority of the people, but the majority never rise above the level of adolescence in their mental processes.
• Democracy is a condition of life in which people are set to worrying whether somebody somewhere is enjoying things that they are not, and take action to see that they don't. This is what Puritanism is also.
• The people rule, but they rule in name only--much as the king may be said to rule in a modern constitutional monarchy.
• A democracy is run by politicians who have mastered the art of manipulating the mob, of soothing it with mellifluous words while swindling it under the table.
• The public will does not get expressed in a democracy, since the public is not fed the issues, but only the issues dressed up in a way that the politicians choose to dress them up.
• In Mencken's mind the freedom to play with language, to mingle the talk of a streetcar conductor or an ice wagon driver with that of a professor of classics is a distinctly American prerogative and distinctly American achievement.
• He believed that the number of first-rate men remains constant, that human folly remains constant, and that no amount of breeding or social uplift will change the proportion of human blank cartridges to men of genuine intelligence.

• Only God (or another tree) can make a tree.

• Beware the fury of a patient man.
• No government has ever been, or can ever be, wherein time-servers and blockheads will not be uppermost.

• The past always looks better than it was; it's only pleasant because it isn't here.
• One of the strangest things about life is that the poor, who need money the most, are the very ones that never have it.
• Work is work if you're paid to do it, and it's pleasure if you pay to be allowed to do it.

• Don't put no constrictions on da people. Leave 'em da hell alone.

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