H. L. Mencken Quotes About Belief
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Why assume so glibly that the God who presumably created the universe is still running it? It is certainly conceivable that He may have finished it and then turned it over to lesser gods to operate.
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I have little belief in human progress. The human race is incurably idiotic. It will never be happy.
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The Catholic clergy seldom bother to make their arguments plausible; it is plain that they have little respect for human intelligence, and indeed little belief in its existence.
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A dull, dark, depressing day in Winter: the whole world looks like a Methodist church at Wednesday night prayer meeting.
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To the best of my knowledge and belief, the average American newspaper, even of the so-called better sort, is not only quite as bad as Upton Sinclair says it is, but 10 times worse
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Hope: A pathological belief in the occurrence of the impossible.
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Who will argue that 98.6 Farenheit is the right temperature for man? As for me, I decline to do it. It may be that we are all actually freezing hence the pervading stupidity of mankind. At 110 or 115 degrees even archbishops might be intelligent.
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The more a man dreams, the less he believes.
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The most costly of all follies is to believe passionately in the palpably not true. It is the chief occupation of mankind.
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To the best of my knowledge and belief, the average American newspaper, even of the so-called better sort, is not only quite as bad as Upton Sinclair says it is, but 10 times worse, 10 times as ignorant, 10 times as unfair and tyrannical, 10 times as complaisant and pusillanimous, and 10 times as devious, hypocritical, disingenuous, deceitful, pharisaical, Pecksniffian, fraudulent, slippery, unscrupulous, perfidious, lewd and dishonest.
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Faith may be defined briefly as an illogical belief in the occurrence of the improbable.... A man full of faith is simply one who has lost (or never had) the capacity for clear and realistic thought. He is not a mere ass: he is actually ill.
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My belief in free speech is so profound that I am seldom tempted to deny it to the other fellow. Nor do I make any effort to differentiate between the other fellow right and that other fellow wrong, for I am convinced that free speech is worth nothing unless it includes a full franchise to be foolish and even...malicious.
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Friendship is a common belief in the same fallacies, mountebanks and hobgoblins.
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The only really respectable Protestants are the fundamentalists. Unfortunately, they are also palpable idiots.
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A man full of faith is simply one who has lost the capacity for clear and realistic thought.
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The central belief of every moron is that he is the victim of a mysterious conspiracy against his common rights and true deserts.
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It is even harder for the average ape to believe that he has descended from man.
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I am one of the few goyim who have ever actually tackled the Talmud. I suppose you now expect me to add that it is a profound and noble work, worthy of hard study by all other goyims. Unhappily, my report must differ from this expectation. It seems to me, save for a few bright spots, to be quite indistinguishable from rubbish.
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The truth that survives is simply the lie that is pleasantest to believe.
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As long as the Southern colleges have revivals on their campuses and students get converted to Methodism and join the YMCA and are accepted as gentlemen, it will be impossible to think of the South as civilized...The educated folk of the Old South took theology lightly, and religion to them was hardly more than a charming ritual, useful on solemn occassions.
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After all, why be good? How many will actually believe it of us?
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Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance.
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Save among politicians it is no longer necessary for any educated American to profess belief in Thirteenth Century ideas
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Faith may be defined briefly as an illogical belief in the occurrence of the improbable.
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