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.
If a man isn't a certain age, he just isn't interesting.
Are you acquainted with the mood of mind in which, if you were seated alone, and the cat licking its kitten on the rug before you, you would watch the operation so intently that puss's neglect of one ear would put you seriously out of temper?
Celebrity is a national drama whose characters' parts and plots are written by the tabloids, gossip columnists, websites and interactive buttons. The famous don't actually have to turn up to their own lives at all.
The business of America is not business. Neither is it war. The business of america is justice and securing the blessings of liberty.
It is racist, and it was racist when it was created. The Indian Act controls, or seeks to control, the lives of all indigenous people in a way that you and I would never accept.
Nothing, not even human life, is more precious to us than our myths about ourselves.
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