“One hears murmurs against Mussolini on the ground that he is a desperado: the real objection to him is that he is a politician. Indeed, he is probably the most perfect specimen of the genus politician on view in the world today. His career has been impeccably classical. Beginning life as a ranting Socialist of the worst type, he abjured Socialism the moment he saw better opportunities for himself on the other side, and ever since then he has devoted himself gaudily to clapping Socialists in jail, filling them with castor oil, sending blacklegs to burn down their houses, and otherwise roughing them. Modern politics has produced no more adept practitioner.”

— H.L. Mencken

"Mussolini" in the Baltimore Evening Sun (3 August 1931), also in A Second Mencken Chrestomathy : New Selections from the Writings of America's Legendary Editor, Critic, and Wit (1994) edited by Terry Teachout, p. 34
1930s

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "One hears murmurs against Mussolini on the ground that he is a desperado: the real objection to him is that he is a pol…" by H.L. Mencken?

H.L. Mencken281

American journalist and writer 1880–1956

Related quotes

“On November 24, 1914, when he was expelled from the Socialist Party, Mussolini insisted that his expulsion could not divest him of his ‘socialist faith.’ He made the subtitle of his new paper, Il Popolo d’Italia, ‘A Socialist Daily.’ National intervention in the European conflagration was an immediate issue and as a problem it divided socialists, but since most continental socialist parties had opted for war, Mussolini conceived at that time that interventionism was not a commitment sufficient to require the abandonment of socialism.”

A. James Gregor (1929–2019) American political scientist

Source: The Ideology of Fascism: The Rationale of Totalitarianism, (1969), p. 141

“Lenin was the contemporary politician whom [Mussolini] most admired and he studied the Russian revolution closely to see what lessons it offered. Lenin seemed to him ‘the very negation of socialism’ because he had not created a dictatorship of the proletariat or of the socialist party, but only of a few intellectuals who had found the secret of winning power. Mussolini was, in truth, envious.”

Denis Mack Smith (1920–2017) British historian

Source: Mussolini, 1983, p. 41

“Whatever one thinks of his Marxism today, Mussolini was accepted by his socialist peers as a Marxist theoretician. He rose to leadership in the Italian Socialist Party at least in part on the basis of his recognized capacity as a socialist intellectual.”

A. James Gregor (1929–2019) American political scientist

Source: The Ideology of Fascism: The Rationale of Totalitarianism, (1969), p. 99

“A litigant to winning so devotes his energies
That he never gives his neighbours or himself a moment’s rest,
But for every other pleasure he has neither ears nor eyes.”

Pietro Nelli (1672–1740) Italian painter

Un litigante è di vincer si ingordo,
Che non dà a se, o altrui pace o riposo,
Ma ad ogni altro piacer è cieco e sordo.
Satire, II., IX. — "Peccadigli degli Avvocati."
Translation reported in Harbottle's Dictionary of quotations French and Italian (1904), p. 432.

“He who must be what he is, may curse his fate, but cannot change it; on the other hand, he who can transform himself has no one in the world but himself to blame for his failings, no one but himself to hold responsible for his dissatisfaction.”

Stanisław Lem book The Cyberiad

In "Tale of the Three Storytelling Machines of King Genius", §3
The Cyberiad (1967)

“He is the cheapest politician Cambodia has ever known.”

Norodom Ranariddh (1944) Cambodian politician

by Sam Rainsy, President of the Cambodian National Rescue Party in January 2015
[Meas Sokchea and Joe Freeman, http://www.phnompenhpost.com/national/royalist-return-envisioned, Royalist return envisioned, 6 January 2015, 28 August 2015, Phnom Penh Post]

“In politics, he has always been a republican with advanced Socialist sympathies, and internationalist at heart, and, as they said in the eighteenth century, a "citizen of the world." He has always fought social injustice. In art, he loves, above all, Beethoven, Shakespeare, and Goethe… Rembrandt is the painter dearest to him. But his chosen country is Italy.”

Romain Rolland (1866–1944) French author

On himself, as quoted in World Authors 1900-1950 (1996)

“Goethe found such a point of view early in Spinoza, and he gladly recognizes how much the views of this great thinker have been in keeping with the needs of his youth. He found himself in him, and so he could fix himself to him in the most beautiful way.”

Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677) Dutch philosopher

Original in German: Einen solchen Standpunkt fand Goethe früh in Spinoza, und er erkennet mit Freuden, wie sehr die Ansichten dieses großen Denkers den Bedürfnissen seiner Jugend gemäß gewesen. Er fand in ihm sich selber, und so konnte er sich auch an ihm auf das schönste befestigen.
Johann Peter Eckermann, Gespräche mit Goethe in den letzten Jahren seines Lebens, 1831
A - F

“Man is alone in the world, in tremendous eternal isolation. He has no object outside himself; lives for nothing else; he is far removed from being the slave of his wishes, of his abilities, of his necessities; he stands far above social ethics; he is alone. Thus he becomes one and all.”

Otto Weininger book Sex and Character

[Paraphrasing Kant] p. 162.
Sex and Character (1903)

“He reveals that he has been a poor politician, a bad judge and a malevolent individual.”

Gough Whitlam (1916–2014) Australian politician, 21st Prime Minister of Australia

Abiding Interests (1997), p. 44
On Garfield Barwick

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

H.L. Mencken281

Related quotes

Related topics