(3089/898) Gummint & democracy (and more Mencken)

464) Government is actually the worst failure of civilized men. There has never been a really good one, and even those that are most tolerable are arbitrary, cruel, grasping and unintelligent.

H.L. Mencken
Minority Report: H.L. Mencken's Notebooks (1956) [CQ]

[Note: cf. #870 Mencken]

465) Every country gets the government it deserves.

Joseph De Maistre
letter (8/1811) [CQ]

466) Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to young boys.

P.J. O'Rourke
Parliament of Whores (1991) [CQ]

[Note: How much worse, then, to have a government run by grown men and women who show less character, intelligence, patience, empathy and understanding of human nature than do most young boys and girls?]

467) Society in every state is a blessing, but Government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil; in its worst state, an intolerable one.

Thomas Paine
Common Sense (1776) [CQ]

468) I love government not least for the extent to which it leaves me alone.

John Updike
Buchanan Dying (1974) [CQ]

469) If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary.

James Madison
Federalist Papers (1788) [CQ]

470) Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.

H.L. Mencken
Little Book in C Major (1916) [OM]

471) The cure for the evils of democracy is more democracy.

H.L. Mencken
Notes on Democracy (1926) [CQ]

[Note: Quoted by Vice President Al Gore, 10/6/93]

472) Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.

Winston Churchill
in Hansard (11/11/47) [OM]

[Note: Perhaps the only things worse than having a government is have a corrupt and incompetent government, or else having no government at all.]

473) This is one of the paradoxes of the democratic movement - that it loves a crowd and fears the individuals who compose it - that the religion of humanity should have no faith in human beings.

Walter Lippmann
A Preface to Politics (1914) [CQ]

[Note: "I love mankind! [or "humanity"] It's people I can't stand!"

Charles M. Schulz
Peanuts (comic strip, c. 1965)
spoken by the character
"Linus van Pelt"]

474) Democracy is like blowing your nose. You may not do it well, but you ought to do it yourself.

G.K. Chesterton
quoted by Garry Wills in
"Read Polls, Heed America" in
New York Times Magazine (11/6/94)

[I have been unable to find a source for this quote by Chesterton, but it may be based on this:

The democratic contention is that government (helping to rule the tribe) is a thing like falling in love, and not a thing like dropping into poetry. It is not something analogous to playing the church organ, painting on vellum, discovering the North Pole (that insidious habit), looping the loop, being Astronomer Royal, and so on. For these things we do not wish a man to do at all unless he does them well. It is, on the contrary, a thing analogous to writing one's own love-letters or blowing one's own nose. These things we want a man to do for himself, even if he does them badly. [...] In short, the democratic faith is this: that the most terribly important things must be left to ordinary men themselves--the mating of the sexes, the rearing of the young, the laws of the state. This is democracy; and in this I have always believed.

G.K. Chesterton
Orthodoxy (1908)]

Sources

[CQ] - The Columbia Dictionary of Quotations (1993)
[OM] - The Oxford Dictionary of Modern Quotations (1991)


Note: "3089/898" is the designation I've given to the project of posting all my collected quotes, excerpts and ideas (3089 of them) in the remaining days of the Bush administration (of which there were 898 left when I began).

As of today, there are 736 days remaining in the administration of the worst American President ever.