A Quote by H. L. Mencken

Good government is that which delivers the citizen from being done out of his life and property too arbitrarily and violently-one that relieves him sufficiently from the barbaric business of guarding them to enable him to engage in gentler, more dignified, and more agreeable undertakings.
It is not the right of property which is protected, but the right to property. Property, per se, has no rights; but the individual - the man - has three great rights, equally sacred from arbitrary interference: the right to his life, the right to his liberty, the right to his property The three rights are so bound together as to be essentially one right. To give a man his life but to deny him his liberty, is to take from him all that makes his life worth living. To give him his liberty but take from him the property which is the fruit and badge of his liberty is to still leave him a slave.
To be used of God. Is there anything more encouraging, more fulfilling? Perhaps not, but there is something more basic: to meet with God. To linger in His presence, to shut out the noise of the city and, in quietness, give Him the praise He deserves. Before we engage ourselves in His work, let's meet Him in His Word... in prayer... in worship.
God created man and, finding him not sufficiently alone, gave him a companion to make him feel his solitude more keenly.
To give a man his life but deny him his liberty, is to take from him all that makes his life worth living. To give him his liberty but take from him the property which is the fruit and badge of his liberty, is to still leave him a slave.
Political liberty in a citizen is that tranquillity of spirit which comes from the opinion each one has of his security, and in order for him to have this liberty the government must be such that one citizen cannot fear another citizen.
Being sensible that I am unable to do any thing without God's help, I do humbly entreat Him, by His grace, to enable me to keep these Resolutions, so far as they are agreeable to His will, for Christ's sake.
The art of using troops is this: ......When ten to the enemy's one, surround him; ......When five times his strength, attack him; ......If double his strength, divide him; ......If equally matched you may engage him; ......If weaker numerically, be capable of withdrawing; ......And if in all respects unequal, be capable of eluding him, ..........for a small force is but booty for one more powerful.
My conception of the audience is of a public each member of which is carrying about with him what he thinks is an anxiety, or a hope, or a preoccupation which is his alone and isolates him from mankind and in this respect at least the function of a play is to reveal him to himself so that he may touch others by virtue of the revelation of his mutuality with them. If only for this reason I regard the theater as a serious business, one that makes or should make man more human, which is to say, less alone.
He wanted to talk to them, if he could, to discover whether they had truths about life which he had never heard before. Here is what he hoped new truths might do for him: enable him to laugh at his troubles, to go on living, and to keep out of the North Wing of the Midland County General Hospital, which was for lunatics.
I am always for getting a boy forward in his learning, for that is sure good. I would let him at first read any English book which happens to engage his attention; because you have done a great deal when you have brought him to have entertainment from a book. He'll get better books afterwards.
The more a man desirous to pass at a value above his worth can contrast, by dignified silence, the garrulity of trivial minds, the more the world will give him credit for the wealth which he does not possess.
Nothing is more false and more indiscreet than always to want to choose what mortifies us in everything. By this rule a person would soon ruin his health, his business, his reputation, his relations with his relatives and friends, in fact every good work which Providence gives him.
A good laugh is a mighty good thing, and rather too scarce a good thing; the more's the pity. So, if any one man, in his own proper person, afford stuff for a good joke to anybody, let him not be backward, but let him cheerfully allow himself to spend and be spent in that way. And the man that has anything bountifully laughable about him, be sure there is more in that man than you perhaps think for.
What is natural in me, is natural in many other men, I infer, and so I am not afraid to write that I never had loved Steerforth better than when the ties that bound me to him were broken. In the keen distress of the discovery of his unworthiness, I thought more of all that was brilliant in him, I softened more towards all that was good in him, I did more justice to the qualities that might have made him a man of a noble nature and a great name, than ever I had done in the height of my devotion to him.
War means fighting. The business of the soldier is to fight. Armies are not called out to dig trenches, to throw up breastworks, to live in camps, but to find the enemy and strike him; to invade his country, and do him all possible damage in the shortest possible time. This will involve great destruction of life and property while it lasts; but such a war will of necessity be of brief continuance, and so would be an economy of life and property in the end.
Who wishes to give himself an abundance of business let him equip these two things, a ship and a woman. For no two things involve more business, if you have begun to fit them out. Nor are these two things ever sufficiently adorned, nor is any excess of adornment enough for them.
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