… is from page 113 of the 1997 Johns Hopkins University Press edition of H.L. Mencken’s 1956 collection, Minority Report:
Of all varieties of men, the one who is least comprehensible to me is the fellow who immolates himself upon the alter of what he conceives to be the public interest – in other words, the reformer, the uplifter, the man, so-called, of public spirit. What I am chiefly unable to understand is his oafish certainty that he is right – his almost pathological inability to grasp the notion that, after all, he may be wrong.
