QUOTE OF THE DAY:

My basic point of view…went back to  my  early  teens,  and  has  never changed in any essential during the half  century  since.  Under  the  influence of my father…I emerged into sentience with an almost instinctive distrust of all schemes of revolution and reform. They were, to me, only signs  and  symptoms  of  a fundamental hallucination, to wit, the hallucination  that  human  nature  could  be  changed  by  passing  statutes  and  preaching gospels—that natural law could be repealed by taking thought.

—H.L. Mencken on socialism in 1910, as quoted by Edward Short in “Heavens on Earth, the creation of perfection, American-style” at the Weekly Standard, a review of Paradise Now — The Story of American Utopianism, by Chris Jennings.