"The common notion that free speech prevails..." - Quote by H L Mencken

“No matter how happily a woman may be married, it always pleases her to discover that there is a nice man who wishes that she were not.”

“Women have simple tastes. They get pleasure out of the conversation of children in arms and men in love.”

“No one in this world, so far as I know--and I have searched the records for years, and employed agents to help me--has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people. Nor has any one ever lost public office thereby. The mistake that is made always runs the other way. Because the plain people are able to speak and understand, and even, in many cases, to read and write, it is assumed that they have ideas in their heads, and an appetite for more. This assumption is folly. They dislike ideas, for ideas make them uncomfortable.”

“Why, in a country of free speech, are there phone bills?”

“Democracy is grounded upon so childish a complex of fallacies that they must be protected by a rigid system of taboos, else even halfwits would argue it to pieces. Its first concern must be to penalize the free play of ideas.”

“The values that we talked about, the values democracy and free speech and international norms and rule of law, respecting the ability of other countries to determine their own destiny and preserve their sovereignty and territorial integrity. Things are not something that we can set aside.”

“I am always talking about the human condition and about American society in particular: what it is like to be human, what makes us weep, what makes us fall and stumble and somehow rise and go on from darkness into darkness and that darkness carpeted.”

“When you're born in this world you're given a ticket to the Freak Show. And when you're born in America, you're given a front row seat. And some of us get to sit there with notebooks.”

“The only definition by which America's best days are behind it is on a purely relative basis.”