Quote of the Day (H.L. Mencken, on ‘A New Fallacy in Politics’)

“[I]t is not the leadership that is old and decorous that fetches [the American], but the leadership that is new and extravagant. He will resist dictation out of the past, but he will follow a new messiah with almost Russian willingness, and into the wildest vagaries of economics, religion, morals and speech. A new fallacy in politics spreads faster in the United States than anywhere else on earth, and so does a new fashion in hats, or a new revelation of God, or a new means of killing time, or a new metaphor or piece of slang.”—American journalist, essayist, and philologist H.L. Mencken (1880-1956), The American Language: An Inquiry Into the Development of English in the United States (1919)