The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule.
Interpretation
This quote suggests that the desire to improve or save humanity often hides a deeper motivation for control or power.
H. L. Mencken's quote highlights the hypocrisy that can exist in altruistic intentions. It implies that many who claim to want to save humanity may actually be driven by a desire for dominance and authority, using noble causes as a facade for their true ambitions.
In practice
In a discussion about political motives during a debate.
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.
Danger knows full well that Caesar is more dangerous than he. We are two lions litterβd in one day, and I the elder and more terrible.
Temperance is simply a disposition of the mind which binds the passion.
What has destroyed liberty and the rights of man in every government which has ever existed under the sun? The generalizing and concentrating all cares and power into one body, no matter whether of the autocrats of Russia or France, or of the aristocrats of a Venetian senate.
He had fought back with every weapon in his arsenal, being alternatively obtuse, evasive and pedantic, for it was wonderful how you could obscure an emotional issue by appearing to seek precision.
Long before you knew what death was you were wishing it on someone else.
I've given my life to the principle and the ideal of memory, and remembrance.
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