From H.L. Mencken, American journalist, essayist, magazine editor, satirist, critic of American life and culture, and scholar of American English:
Government is actually the worst failure of civilized man. There has never been a really good one, and even those that are most tolerable are arbitrary, cruel, grasping and unintelligent.
Mencken may be the patron saint of political cynics. Much of his voluminous writing is still in print, and is still worth a read (he wrote in the first half of the twentieth century).
