The only good bureaucrat is one with a pistol at his head. Put it in his hand and it's good-bye to the Bill of Rights. - H. L. Mencken

Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard.

The older I grow the more I distrust the familiar doctrine that age brings wisdom. . . . Certainly it would be difficult to imagine any committee of relatively young men, of thirty or thirty-five, showing the unbroken childishness, ignorance and lack of humor of the Supreme Court of the United States. The average age of the learned justices must be well beyond sixty, and all of them are supposed to be of finished and mellowed sagacity. Yet their knowledge of the most ordinary principles of justice often turns out to be extremely meager, and when they spread themselves grandly upon a great case their reasoning powers are usually found to be precisely equal to those of a respectable Pullman conductor.

Men become civilized, not in proportion to their willingness to believe, but in proportion to their readiness to doubt. The more stupid the man, the larger his stock of adamantine assurances, the heavier his load of faith.