Free Second Mencken Chrestomathy by H.L. Mencken

American people could have kept him out of the presidency by prolonging the Civil War until 1877, it would have been an excellent investment. A more honest man never lived, but West Point and bad whiskey had transformed his cortex into a sort of soup.
2 Harding
    From the Baltimore
Evening Sun
, July 19, 1923
    No one on this earth has ever heard the Hon. Mr. Harding say anything intelligent. No one has ever heard him repeat an intelligent saying of anyone else without making complete nonsense ofit. In the coining and dissemination of words that are absolutely devoid of sensible meaning, in the wholesale emission of sonorous and deafening bilge—in brief, in the manufacture and utterance of precisely the stuff that the plain people admire and venerate—he has no peer under Heaven.
3 Coolidge
    From the Baltimore
Evening Sun
, Feb. 9, 1925
    The man’s merits, in the Babbitt view, are immense and incomparable. He seems, indeed, scarcely like a man at all, but more like some miraculous visitation or act of God. He is the ideal made visible, if not audible—perfection put into a cutaway coat and trotted up and down like a mannequin in a cloak and suit atelier. Nor was there any long stress of training him—no season of doubt and misgiving. Nature heaved him forth full-blown, like a new star shot into the heavens. In him the capitalistic philosophy comes to its perfect and transcendental form. Thrift, to him, is the queen of all the virtues. He respects money in each and every one of its beautiful forms—pennies, nickels, dimes, dollars, five-dollar bills, and so on
ad infinitum
. He venerates those who have it. He believes that they have wisdom. He craves the loan and use of that wisdom. He invites them to breakfast, and listens to them. The things they revere, he reveres. The things they long for, he longs to give them.
4 Mussolini
    From the Baltimore
Evening Sun
, Aug. 3, 1931
    One hears murmurs against Mussolini on the ground that he is a desperado: the real objection to him is that he is a politician. Indeed, he is probably the most perfect specimen of the genus politicianon view in the world today. His career has been impeccably classical. Beginning life as a ranting Socialist of the worst type, he abjured Socialism the moment he saw better opportunities for himself on the other side, and ever since then he has devoted himself gaudily to clapping Socialists in jail, filling them with castor oil, sending blacklegs to burn down their houses, and otherwise roughing them. Modern politics has produced no more adept practitioner. He is its Shakespeare, its Michelangelo, its Bach.
Liberty and Democracy
    From the Baltimore
Evening Sun
, April 13, 1925
    Liberty and democracy are eternal enemies, and every one knows it who has ever given any sober reflection to the matter. A democratic state may profess to venerate the name, and even pass laws making it officially sacred, but it simply cannot tolerate the thing. In order to keep any coherence in the governmental process, to prevent the wildest anarchy in thought and act, the government must put limits upon the free play of opinion. In part, it can reach that end by mere propaganda, by the bald force of its authority—that is, by making certain doctrines officially infamous. But in part it must resort to force,
i.e.
, to law. One of the main purposes of laws in a democratic society is to put burdens upon intelligence and reduce it to impotence. Ostensibly, their aim is to penalize anti-social acts; actually, their aim is to penalize heretical opinions. At least ninety-five Americans out of every 100 believe that this process is honest and even laudable; it is practically impossible to convince them that there is anything evil in it. In other words, they cannot grasp the concept of liberty. Always they condition it with the doctrine that the state,
i.e.
, the majority, has a sort of right of eminent domain in acts, and even in ideas—that it is perfectly free, whenever it is so