A Quote by H. L. Mencken
There is only one honest impulse at the bottom of Puritanism, and that is the impulse to punish the man with a superior capacity for happiness.
Related Quotes
The one impulse in man which cannot be erased is his impulse toward freedom, his impulse toward sanity, toward higher levels of attainment in all of his endeavors.
It's not that bullying is any worse today. The impulse for cruelty is the same impulse. The only difference is that the tools to achieve that have become more sophisticated.
Always respond to every impulse to pray. The impulse to pray may come when you are reading or when you are battling with a text. I would make an absolute law of this: always obey such an impulse.
The impulse to write the poem, that impulse is a great dramatic impulse. But hell, anybody could write a play. I do know this: all writers are not dramatists. You may be a great writer, but that doesn't necessarily mean you're a dramatist. Very few people have done both.
Great ages of art come only when a widespread creative impulse meets an equally widespread impulse of sympathy . . .
To be different is a negative motive, and no creative thought or created thing grows out of a negative impulse. A negative impulse is always frustrating. And to be different means ‘not like this’ and ‘not like that.’ And the ‘not like’—that’s why postmodernism, with the prefix of ‘post,’ couldn’t work. No negative impulse can work, can produce any happy creation. Only a positive one.
I love the abandonment to impulse, I act from impulse only, and I love to madness that others do the same by me.
The desire to punish is a desire that emanates from a place of equality and justice. The lesson I feel that we have to confront is that that impulse is so easily transmuted into something corrosive and corrupt in how it's actually put into practice. That's the danger. It's not that the impulse is wrong or unjust or not totally righteous. It's that the ways in which the system that operates, the system that we've constructed tends to not deliver the promise of equity we might want, when we look to the system to provide it.
Distrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful.
Habit must play a larger place in our religious life. We worship when we feel like it, we pray when we feel like it. We read the Bible when we feel like it. Leaving our religious exercises to the promptings of impulse, we become creatures of impulse rather than soldiers of Christ. An army made up of creatures of impulse would be only a mob. So is a church.
There is in government a living impulse to extend itself indefinitely; and there is in freedom a necessity to resist that impulse.
If you get an impulse in a scene, no matter how wrong it seems, follow the impulse. It might be something and if it ain't - take two!
If you have an impulse, not if you're going to ruin someone elses' scene, if you have an impulse of a funny little add-on or taking something in a weird direction, try it.
One impulse of photography, as immediate as its impulse to extend the visible, is to theatricalize its subjects. The photographer's command, Watch the birdie! is essentially a stage direction.
The impulse to mar and to destroy is as ancient and almost as nearly universal as the impulse to create. The one is an easier way than the other of demonstrating power.
Many a one commits a reprehensible action, who is at bottom an honourable man, because man seldom acts upon natural impulse, but from some secret passion of the moment which lies hidden and concealed within the narrowest folds of his heart.
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