The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.
—H.L. Mencken, 1921
Archive
Quotes
Do you suppose it possible to know democracy without knowing the people?
—Xenophon, c. 370 BCThey exchange their home and sweet thresholds for exile, and seek under another sun another home.
—Virgil, c. 30 BCJokes are grievances.
—Marshall McLuhan, 1969The mind that is not baffled is not employed.
—Wendell Berry, 1983Petty laws breed great crimes.
—Ouida, 1880Reading is learning, but applying is also learning and the more important kind of learning at that.
—Mao Zedong, 1936To know the abyss of the darkness and not to fear it, to entrust oneself to it and whatever may arise from it—what greater gift?
—Ursula K. Le Guin, 1975If the world were good for nothing else, it is a fine subject for speculation.
—William Hazlitt, 1823Home is the girl’s prison and the woman’s workhouse.
—George Bernard Shaw, 1903Men, my dear, are very queer animals—a mixture of horse nervousness, ass stubbornness, and camel malice.
—T. H. Huxley, 1895From hell’s heart I stab at thee; for hate’s sake I spit my last breath at thee.
—Herman Melville, 1851There is no foreign land; it is the traveler only that is foreign.
—Robert Louis Stevenson, 1883