Ask the average American what is the salient passion in his emotional armamentarium — what is the idea that lies at the bottom of all his other ideas… - H. L. Mencken

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Ask the average American what is the salient passion in his emotional armamentarium — what is the idea that lies at the bottom of all his other ideas — and it is very probable that, nine times out of ten, he will nominate his hot and unquenchable rage for liberty. He regards himself, indeed, as the chief exponent of liberty in the whole world, and all its other advocates as no more than his followers, half timorous and half envious. To question his ardour is to insult him as grievously as if one questioned the honour of the republic or the chastity of his wife. And yet it must be plain to any dispassionate observer that this ardour, in the course of a century and a half, has lost a large part of its old burning reality and descended to the estate of a mere phosphorescent superstition.