A Quote by H. L. Mencken
The fact is that the average man's love of liberty is nine-tenths imaginary, exactly like his love of sense, justice and truth.
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The average man's love of liberty is nine-tenths imaginary, exactly like his love of sense, justice and truth... It takes a special sort of man to understand and enjoy liberty - and he is usually an outlaw in democratic societies.
The fact is that the average man's love of liberty is nine-tenths imaginary, exactly like his love of sense, justice and truth... Liberty is not a thing for the great masses of men. It is the exclusive possession of a small and disreputable minority, like knowledge, courage and honor. It takes a special sort of man to understand and enjoy liberty - and he is usually an outlaw in democratic societies.
Did I hate him, then? Indeed, I believe so. A love like that can grow to be nine-tenths hatred and still call itself love.
The fact is that liberty, in any true sense, is a concept that lies quite beyond the reach of the inferior man's mind. And no wonder, for genuine liberty demands of its votaries a quality he lacks completely, and that is courage. The man who loves it must be willing to fight for it; blood, said Jefferson, is its natural manure. Liberty means self-reliance, it means resolution, it means the capacity for doing without . . . the average man doesn't want to be free. He wants to be safe.
I always say perseverance is nine-tenths of any art — not that it's much help to be nine-tenths an artist, of course.
Every man has a choice between love of truth and love of repose. Love of repose brings him a solid reputation and peaceful life; love of truth keeps him in suspense. A man who loves truth respects the highest law of his being.
Possession isn't nine-tenths of the law. It's nine-tenths of the problem.
I tell you the truth: if I lived in a country where there was no day appointed for elections, I would become a revolutionary, if not a terrorist. And that is because I love liberty too much; without liberty a man is not a man. He has no dignity.
For Africa to me... is more than a glamorous fact. It is a historical truth. No man can know where he is going unless he knows exactly where he has been and exactly how he arrived at his present place.
For there is one thing I can safely say: that those bound by love must obey each other if they are to keep company long. Love will not be constrained by mastery; when mastery comes, the God of love at once beats his wings, and farewell he is gone. Love is a thing as free as any spirit; women naturally desire liberty, and not to be constrained like slaves; and so do men, if I shall tell the truth.
His justice is the love that gives to each one of His creatures the gifts that His mercy has previously decreed. And His mercy is His love, doing justice to its own exigencies, and renewing the gift which we had failed to accept.
That's the way it is: life inculdes a lot of empty space. We are one-tenth living tissue, nine-tenths water; life is one-tenth Here and Now, nine-tenths a history lesson. For most of the time the Here and Now is neither now nor here.
I gave examples from my clinical practice of how love was not wholly a thought or feeling. I told of how that very evening there would be some man sitting at a bar in the local village, crying into his beer and sputtering to the bartender how much he loved his wife and children while at the same time he was wasting his family's money and depriving them of his attention. We recounted how this man was thinking love and feeling love--were they not real tears in his eyes?--but he was not in truth behaving with love.
The good citizen will demand liberty for himself, and as a matter of pride he will see to it that others receive the liberty which he thus claims as his own. Probably the best test of true love of liberty in any country is the way in which minorities are treated in that country. Not only should there be complete liberty in matters of religion and opinion, but complete liberty for each man to lead his life as he desires, provided only that in so doing he does not wrong his neighbor.
Feelings dwell in man; but man dwells in his love. That is no metaphor, but the actual truth. Love does not cling to the I in such a way as to have the Thou only for its " content," its object; but love is between I and Thou. The man who does not know this, with his very being know this, does not know love; even though he ascribes to it the feelings he lives through, experiences, enjoys, and expresses.
God works for man through man and seldom, if at all, in any other way. He asks for our voices to speak His truth, for our hands to do His work here below, sweet voices and clean hands to make liberty and love prevail over injustice and hate.
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