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.
Interpretation
True liberty requires courage and self-reliance, traits that are often lacking in the average person who prefers safety over freedom.
H. L. Mencken's quote suggests that genuine liberty is an ideal that transcends the understanding of those who do not possess the necessary qualities to uphold it. He argues that while people may desire freedom, many are more invested in the comforts of security. The essence of liberty lies in the willingness to confront challenges and embrace independence, but this requires a courageous spirit that most individuals lack; instead, they often choose the safety net of conformity and compliance over the responsibility that comes with true freedom.
In practice
During a rally advocating for civil rights, one might quote Mencken to emphasize the importance of courage in the fight for liberty.
I know a good many men of great learning-that is, men born with an extraordinary eagerness and capacity to acquire knowledge. One and all, they tell me that they can't recall learning anything of any value in school. All that schoolmasters managed to accomplish with them was to test and determine the amount of knowledge that they had already acquired independently-and not infrequently the determination was made clumsily and inaccurately.
It takes a long while for a naturally trustful person to reconcile himself to the idea that after all God will not help him
It is the theory of all modern civilized governments that they protect and foster the liberty of the citizen; it is the practice of all of them to limit its exercise, and sometimes very narrowly.
The central belief of every moron is that he is the victim of a mysterious conspiracy against his common rights and true deserts.
The cure for the evils of democracy is more democracy.
It is my conviction that no normal man ever fell in love, within the ordinary meaning of the term, after the age of thirty.
Every situation--nay, every moment--is of infinite worth; for it is the representative of a whole eternity.
Democracy is when the indigent, and not the men of property, are the rulers.
This modesty in a sect is perhaps a singular instance in the history of mankind, every other sect supposing itself in possession of all truth, and that those who differ are so far in the wrong ; like a man traveling in foggy weather, those at some distance before him on the road he sees wrapped up in the fog, as well as those behind him, and also the people in the fields on each side, but near him all appears clear, tho' in truth he is as much in the fog as any of them.
We judge others by their actions but we judge ourselves by our intensions.
How can it be that mathematics, being after all a product of human thought which is independent of experience, is so admirably appropriate to the objects of reality?
People who think you could wave a magic wand and the legacy of the past will be over are blind.
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