When fanatics are on top there is no limit to oppression.
Interpretation
The unchecked power of fanatics can lead to extreme oppression without limits.
H. L. Mencken's quote highlights the dangers posed by fanatical ideologies, especially when they gain power. In such situations, there is often a relentless pursuit of control and dominance, resulting in the subjugation of dissenting voices and minority perspectives, reflecting a profound threat to freedom and human rights.
In practice
During a lecture about political structures, this quote can be used to discuss the impact of fanaticism on societies.
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.
Democracy is based on the assumption that a million men are wiser than one man. How's that again? I missed something.
Land is a very broad as well as a complex issue, and it has to be handled very delicately because around land, there is quite a lot of emotion.
Pick at random any three letters from the alphabet, put them in any order, and you will have an acronym designating a federal agency we can do without.
There's the hypothesis that things just keep happening to Russians, things that keep turning them into the same kind of subjects, as opposed to citizens. The more credible hypothesis, I think, is that there is a kind of trauma, a social trauma that is passed on from generation to generation.
The death penalty not only takes away the life of the person strapped to the table - it takes away a little bit of the humanity in each of us.
Although there has always been a hermeneutic problem in Christianity, the hermeneutic question today seems to us a new one.
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