A Quote by H. L. Mencken
The book of Genesis, a farrago of nonsense so wholly absurd that even Sunday-school scholars have to be threatened with Hell to make them accept it.
Related Quotes
A man can make himself put down what comes, even if it seems nauseating nonsense; tomorrow some of it may not seem wholly nonsense at all.
Artist and illustrator R. Crumb did a whole illustration of Genesis. And he didn't go away from the text; he was totally truthful. Reading through that, I was like, "Oh, wow, it's a comic-book version of the Bible." There's a lot of heavy-duty stuff that goes on that doesn't make it into Sunday school.
I'm very much afraid I didn't mean anything but nonsense. Still, you know, words mean more than we mean to express when we use them; so a whole book ought to mean a great deal more than the writer means. So, whatever good meanings are in the book, I'm glad to accept as the meaning of the book.
For me, religion is serious business - a farrago of authoritarian nonsense, misogyny and humble pie, the eternal enemy of human happiness and freedom.
Hersh's account of the bin Laden raid is a farrago of nonsense that is contravened by a multitude of eyewitness accounts, inconvenient facts, and simple common sense.
Most adults, unlike most children, understand the difference between a book that will hold them spellbound for a rainy Sunday afternoon and a book that will put them in touch with a part of themselves they didn't even know existed.
When it comes to the whole debate today over evolution versus creation, Jesus affirmed the early chapters of Genesis were accurate when He said, "Have you not read, that He who created them from the beginning made them male and female" (Matthew 19:4). Adam and Eve didn't come on the scene after billions of years of mutations and evolution. No. God created them all the way back in the beginning-just like Moses reported in the Book of Genesis.
My parents were wonderful Christians. They were religious, but they were not fanatical in any way. I was the one who took it to the extreme. I was told in Sunday school that you had to accept Jesus into your heart if you didn't want to go to hell. So of course I did that a thousand times. But the catch was you had to mean it with all of your heart.
There are successful scholars, public-spirited scholars, upright scholars, cautious scholars, and those who are merely petty men.
I remind everyone: Whether you school them at home or send them to school, you as a parent have the responsibility to make sure they learn and behave. Teachers and principals may help, but parents are the ones who must accept responsibility.
Whereas a man is entitled to marry three more times and that fosters great abuse, even scholars accept that. So certainly since the 1980s Shari'a courts have been established and they allow for women to go to them and they basically grant them annulment. It's not a civil divorce, they don't have the right to grant alimony or maintenance or custody.
It's really absurd to make... a human image, with paint, today, when you think about it... But then all of a sudden, it was even more absurd not to do it.
I came at last to a recognition of myself as, in part, a Tom Sawyer who wanted everything done according to the rules of romantic fiction, and complicated simple solutions with his absurd adolescent, book-born nonsense.
The word ‘slavery’ and ‘right’ are contradictory, they cancel each other out. Whether as between one man and another, or between one man and a whole people, it would always be absurd to say: "I hereby make a covenant with you which is wholly at your expense and wholly to my advantage; I will respect it so long as I please and you shall respect it as long as I wish.
I don't like the Sunday newspapers - I read them because I have to. 'Sunday Times,' 'Telegraph,' 'Independent' on Sunday - I find them heavy and too much! I prefer 'The Economist.'
I've always been literally a lover of the absurd. I think the absurd gives a new dimension to reality and even to common sense. And life, you know, on an everyday basis, is absurd, or may turn out to be absurd. There's no reality without absurdity.
Related Authors
Ayn Rand Quotes
Russian
Writer
C. S. Lewis Quotes
British
Writer
Francois de La Rochefoucauld Quotes
French
Writer
Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes
English
Writer
Haruki Murakami Quotes
Japanese
Writer
J. R. R. Tolkien Quotes
English
Writer
Kurt Vonnegut Quotes
American
Writer
Leo Tolstoy Quotes
Russian
Writer
Mark Twain Quotes
American
Writer
Mason Cooley Quotes
American
Writer
Ray Bradbury Quotes
American
Writer
Samuel Johnson Quotes
English
Writer
Seth Godin Quotes
American
Writer
Sherrilyn Kenyon Quotes
American
Writer
Suzanne Collins Quotes
American
Writer