H. L. Mencken
The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.
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Idleness of the mind is much worse than that...If we are surrounded by the trivial and the vicious...The quality of light by which we scrutinize our lives...One has to do something new...When the missionaries came to Africa...You don't take a photograph, you make it...