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• I know war as few men now living know it, and nothing to me is more revolting. I have long advocated its complete abolition, as its very destructiveness on both friend and foe has rendered it useless as a means of settling international disputes.

• Capitalism, in short, treats each mature individual as an adult moral agent, not as a ward or subject of the state.
• For trade to make sense, something must be owned by someone, and ownership is a moral phenomenon. ... Accordingly, the moral dimension of life touches economics at a very basic level, in the definition of market exchange, of trade.
• The choice, then, may be between market exchange, which can involve some "exploitation," meaning the opportunity of some to take advantage of the circumstances of others, and totalitarian rule, which guarantees that exploitation will occur, as a permanent and unalterable feature of the system.
• Individual rights are the principles by reference to which a human community can be true both to every person's essential community with every other person and to every person's essential individuality as the source of his or her moral character.
• Just as the lynch mob seeks swift penalty at the expense of justice, so the regimented polity seeks its various benevolent objectives at the expense of the very basis of morality, namely human choice.

• A civil society does not originate in a compact of moral philosophers but from the arts of often unscrupulous princes. Men accept authority and obey it, not because of its congruence with moral abstractions but out of self-interest, including fear of punishment. One who is trying to understand political behavior or to become a successful politician can gain little from natural-law theories except possibly appealing rationalizations.

• The doctrine that all men should be free means that all men should be free of oppressive government.

• The remedy in the United States is not less liberty but real liberty--an end to the brutal intolerance of churchly hooligans and flag-waving corporations and all the rest of the small but bloody despots who have made the word Americanism a synonym for coercion and legal crime.

• Pity the man who believes in communism--he believes in something that doesn't believe in him.

• Many politicians of our times are in the habit of laying it down as a self-evident proposition, that no people ought to be free till they are fit to use their freedom. The maxim is worthy of the fool in the old story, who resolved not to go into the water till he had learned to swim. If men are to wait for liberty till they become wise and good in slavery, they may indeed wait forever.
• Every sect clamors for toleration when it is down.

• Law is merely the expression of the will of the strongest for the time being, and therefore laws have no fixity, but shift from generation to generation.

• There are more instances of abridgment of the freedom of the people by gradual silent encroachments of those in power than by violent and sudden usurpation.
• The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted.

• The church says the earth is flat, but I know that it is round, for I have seen the shadow on the moon, and I have more faith in a shadow than in the church.

• There is a disease of the human mind, called the metaphysical tendency, that causes man, after he has by a logical process abstracted the quality from an object, to be subject to a kind of hallucination that makes him take the abstraction for the real thing. This metaphysical tendency, in spite of all the blows of positive science, has still strong root in the minds of the majority of our contemporary fellowmen. It has such influence that many consider government an actual entity, with certain given attributes of reason, justice, equity, independent of the people who compose government. For those who think in this way, government, or the State, is the abstract social power, and it represents, always in the abstract, the general interest. It is the expression of the rights of all and is considered limited by the rights of each. This way of understanding government is supported by those interested, to whom it is an urgent necessity that the principles of authority should be maintained and should always survive the faults and errors of the persons who exercise power.
• In all times and in all places, whatever be the name that the government takes, whatever has been its origin or its organization, its essential function is always that of oppressing and exploiting the masses, and of defending the oppressors and exploiters. Its principle characteristic and indispensable instruments are the policeman and the tax collector, the soldier and the prison. And to these are necessarily added the time-serving priest or teacher.
• Violence is justifiable only when it is necessary to defend oneself and others from violence. It is where necessity ceases that crime begins.

• The hero in the next war, the man who from the air destroys a whole peaceful township in its sleep with poison gas, is not expressing any biological characteristics of his organism, or showing any moral virtues.

• Unfaithfulness in keeping an appointment is an act of clear dishonesty. You might as well borrow a person's money as his time.

• I acknowledge no civil power; I am subject of no prince; I claim more than this--I claim to be the supreme judge and director of the conscience of men--of the peasant that tills the field, and of the prince that sits upon the throne; of the household of privacy, and legislator that makes laws for kingdoms; I am the sole, last supreme judge of what is right and wrong.

• Not every problem someone has with his girlfriend is necessarily due to the capitalist mode of production.

• Publishing a volume of verse is like dropping a rose petal down the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo.
• I've conquered that god damn will power of mine. Gimme a double scotch.
• If you want to get rich from writing, write the sort of thing that's read by persons who move their lips when they're reading to themselves.

• The power to tax is the power to destroy.

• It's no disgrace to be poor, but it might as well be.

• It matters not one iota what political party is in power, or what president holds the reins of office. We are not politicians or public thinkers; we are the rich; we own America; we got it. God knows how; but we intend to keep it.

• The invention of the teenage was a mistake. Once you identify a period of life in which people get to stay out late but don't have to pay taxes--naturally, nobody wants to live any other way.

• If it is more blessed to give than to receive, then most of us are content to let the other fellow have the greater blessing.

• Please accept my resignation. I don’t care to belong to any club that will have me as a member.
• Be free, my friends. One for all and all for me--me for you and three for five and six for a quarter.
• Military intelligence is a contradiction in terms.
• Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it, misdiagnosing it and then misapplying the wrong remedies.

• There's only one way to kill capitalism--by taxes, taxes, and more taxes.

• All men are created equally free and independent, and have certain inherent rights, of which they cannot, by any compact, deprive or divest their posterity: among which are the enjoyment of life and liberty, with the means of acquiring and possessing property, and pursuing the obtaining of happiness and safety.

• If a nation values anything more than freedom, it will lose its freedom; and the irony of it is that if it is comfort or money that it values more, it will lose that too.
• It is not true that suffering ennobles the character; happiness does that sometimes, but suffering, for the most part, makes men perry and vindictive.

• You want to be an artist, but you want other people to starve for your art. (Louis B. Mayer to Gottfried Reinhardt who wanted to make a noncommercial picture)

• Writing not only came to serve as a warehouse for knowledge but also led to more advanced forms of thought. The act of writing removed the emotional heat of face-to-face debate so thinkers could approach their work with cooler heads. Also, because a sentence had to be grammatical and complete to be understood by the reader, writers were forced to make explicit the assumptions of their arguments, and once their ideas were down in cold print, it was easier to go back and check for flaws of fact or logic.

• American youth attributes much more importance to arriving at driver's license age than at voting age.

• They talk of the dignity of work. Bosh. True work is the necessity of poor humanity's earthly condition. The dignity is in leisure.

• To act without clear understanding, to form habits without investigation, to follow a path all one's life without knowing where it really leads--such is the behavior of the multitude.

• There is no possibility whatsoever of reconciling science and theology, at least in Christendom. Either Jesus arose from the dead or He didn't. If He did, then Christianity becomes plausible. If He did not, then it is sheer nonsense. I defy any genuine scientist to say that he believes in the resurrection, or indeed in any other cardinal dogma of the Christian system.
• A Cynic is a man who, when he smells flowers, looks around for a coffin.
• Democracy is a form of religion. It is the worship of jackals by jackasses.
• Under democracy, one party always devotes its chief energies to trying to prove that the other party is unfit to rule--and both commonly succeed, and are right.
• A prohibitionist is the sort of man one wouldn't care to drink with--even if he drank.
• It [envy] is the common possession of all men of the ignoble and incompetent sort, at all times and everywhere. But it is only under democracy that it is liberated; it is only under a democracy that it becomes the philosophy of the state.
• Faith may be defined briefly as an illogical belief in the occurrence of the improbable.
• God is the immemorial refuge of the incompetent, the helpless, the miserable. They find not only sanctuary in His arms, but also a kind of superiority, soothing to their macerated egos; He will set them above their betters.
• The kind of man who demands that government enforce his ideas is always the kind whose ideas are idiotic.
• Man is always looking for someone to boast to; woman is always looking for a shoulder to put her head on.
• So far as I can make out, I believe in only one thing: liberty
• A woman in love is less modest than a man; she has less to be ashamed of.
• Love is like war; easy to begin but very hard to stop.
• Metaphysics is almost always an attempt to prove the incredible by an appeal to the unintelligible.
• About W. G. Harding's style of oratory: "It is a style of a rhinoceros liberating himself by main strength from a lake of boiling molasses."
• About how the yokelry reacts to speeches: "If a sentence ends with a roar it does not stop to inquire how it began. If a phrase has punch, it does not ask that it also have meaning."
• The demagogue is one who preaches doctrines he knows to be untrue to men he knows to be idiots. The demaslave is one who listens to what these idiots have to say and then pretends that he believes it himself. Every man who seeks elective office under democracy has to be either one thing or the other, and most men have to be both.
• A good politician under democracy, is quite as unthinkable as an honest burglar.
• About William Jennings Bryan: "His whole career was devoted to raising ... half-wits against their betters, that he himself might shine."
• Puritanism: The haunting fear that someone somewhere, may be happy.
• There is only one honest impulse at the bottom of Puritanism, and that is the impulse to punish the man with a superior capacity for happiness--to bring him down to the miserable level of "good" men; i.e., of stupid, cowardly, and chronically unhappy men.
• About John Milton, Mencken wrote that he: "was not a Puritan at all, but a libertarian, which is the exact opposite."
• We must respect the other fellow's religion, but only in the sense and to the extent that we respect his theory that his wife is beautiful and his children smart.
• What I admire most in any man is a serene spirit, a steady freedom from moral indignation, and all-embracing tolerance--in brief, what is commonly called good sportsmanship.
• A Sunday school is a prison in which children do penance for the evil conscience of their parents.
• Theology is the effort to explain the unknowable in terms of the not worth knowing.
• Mencken said there are some men whose minds "never get any further than a sort of insensate sweating, like that of a kidney."
• Man on the lower levels, though he quickly reaches the limit of his capacity for taking in actual knowledge, remains capable for a long time thereafter of absorbing delusions. What is true daunts him, but what is not true finds lodgment in his cranium with so little resistance that there is only a trifling emission of heat. ... He has a dreadful capacity for embracing and cherishing impostures. His history since the first records is a history of successive victimizations--by priests, by politicians, by all sorts and conditions of quacks. His heroes are always frauds. In all ages he has hated bitterly the men who were laboring most honestly and effectively for the progress of the race. What such men teach is beyond his grasp. He believes in consequence that it is unsound, immoral and of the devil.
• The men the American people admire most extravagantly are the most daring liars; the men they detest most violently are those who try to tell them the truth.
• When women kiss, it always reminds me of prize-fighters shaking hands.
• On one issue at least, men and women agree: they both distrust women.

• A right that can't be defended is a right that exists only in name.

• Inalienable rights are rights that moral systems must recognize in order not to be self-defeating and self-rescinding. They are rights that individuals need in order to conduct themselves morally...

• If all mankind minus one were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person, than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind.
• No one can be a great thinker who does not recognize that as a thinker it is his first duty to follow his intellect to whatever conclusion it may lead.
• The world would be astonished if it knew how great a proportion of its brightest ornaments, of those most distinguished even in popular estimation for wisdom and virtue, are complete skeptics in religion.
• It is a piece of idle sentimentality that truth, merely as truth, has any inherent power denied to error of prevailing against the dungeon and the stake.

• The Old Testament is responsible for more atheism, agnosticism, disbelief--call it what you will--than any other book ever written; it has emptied more churches than all the counter attractions of cinema, motor-bicycle and golf course.

• Whoever prefers life to death, happiness to suffering, well-being to misery must defend without compromise private ownership in the means of protection.

• Those who welcome death have only tried it from the ears up.
• In the battle of existence, Talent is the punch; Tact is the clever footwork.
• To my embarrassment I was born in bed with a lady.
• When you take material from one writer, it's plagiarism; but when you take it from many writers it's research.
• Women can instantly see through each other, and it's surprising how little they observe that's pleasant.

• Man is certainly stark mad: he cannot make a worm, and yet he makes gods by the dozen.

• Once upon a time, always upon a time.

• The ratio of literacy to illiteracy is constant, but nowadays the illiterates can read.

• Anybody has a right to evade taxes if he can get away with it. No citizen has a moral obligation to assist in maintaining the government. If Congress insists in making stupid mistakes and passing foolish tax laws, millionaires should not be condemned if they take advantage of them.
• Question: "Do you consider $10 a week enough for a longshoreman with a family to support?"
  Answer: "If that's all he can get, and he takes it, I should say it's enough."

• There is only one success--to be able to spend your life in your own way.

• The only possible virtue in being a civilized man instead of a barbarian, an ignoramus, or a moron is in being a free, responsible individual with a mind of one's own.
• The chief proof of God's love then turns out to be the hope he offers that some of his children may escape the evils of his handiwork.
• There can be no 'pure history'--history-in-itself, recorded from nobody's point of view, for nobody's sake.
• The Russian dictatorship of the proletariat has made a farce of the whole Marxist vision: developing a powerful, privileged ruling class to prepare for a classless society, setting up the most despotic state in history so that the state may "wither away," establishing by force a colonial empire to combat imperialism and unite the workers of the world. Although the primitive survives most obviously in the superstitions and fetishes of simple men, it survives as well in quite respectable customs, such as the tabooed word, the initiation ceremony, and the national totem.

• The life and liberty and property and happiness of the common man throughout the world are at the absolute mercy of a few persons whom he has never seen, and involved in complicated quarrels that he has never heard of.

• Three cheers for war in general.
• For the Fascist, everything is in the State, and nothing human or spiritual exists, much less has value, outside the State. In this sense Fascism is totalitarian, and the Fascist State, the synthesis and unity of all values, interprets, develops and gives strength to the whole life of the people.

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