Bonus Quotation of the Day…

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… is from pages 187-188 of H.L. Mencken’s marvelous essay “On Government,” as it is reprinted in the 1996 Johns Hopkins University Press collection of some of Mencken’s essays, Prejudices: A Selection:

All I presume to argue is that something would be accomplished by viewing it [government] more realistically – by ceasing to let its necessary and perhaps useful functions blind us to its ever-increasing crimes against the ordinary rights of the free citizen and the common decencies of the world. The fact that it is generally respected – that it possesses effective machinery for propagating and safeguarding that respect – is the main shield of the rogues and vagabonds who use it to exploit the great masses of diligent and credulous men.