I believe in only one thing: liberty; but I do not believe in liberty enough to want to force it upon anyone.
Interpretation
True liberty involves personal choice and cannot be imposed on others.
In this quote, H. L. Mencken expresses a profound belief in the concept of liberty while simultaneously recognizing the importance of individual autonomy. He suggests that while he values freedom highly, he acknowledges that enforcing this freedom on others contradicts the very nature of liberty itself, indicating a philosophical stance on the balance between personal beliefs and mutual respect for individual choices.
In practice
In a speech about personal freedom and societal obligations.
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.
Gnostic politics is self-defeating in so far as its disregard for the structure of reality leads to continuous warfare.
Surrendering to jargon is a sign of journalism's dismal lack of self-confidence in the optimized age of content-management systems.
The sole and basic source of our strength is the solidarity of workers, peasants and the intelligentsia, the solidarity of the nation, the solidarity of people who seek to live in dignity, truth, and in harmony with their conscience.
From such crooked wood as that which man is made of, nothing straight can be fashioned.
Don't consider our interests or desires. You have no duty to anyone but yourself.
We need to have empathy. When we lose empathy, we lose our humanity.
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