A Quote by H. L. Mencken
A great literature is thus chiefly the product of doubting and inquiring minds in revolt against the immovable certainties of the nation.
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When we seem to have won or lost in terms of certainties, we must, as literature teachers in the classroom, remember such warnings -- let literature teach us that there are no certainties, that the process is open, and that it may be altogether salutary that it is so.
If the ministers of the Church have often permitted nations to revolt for Heaven's cause, they never allowed them to revolt against real evils or known violencess. It is from Heaven that the chains have come to fetter the minds of mortals.
Poetry, even when apparently most fantastic, is always a revolt against artifice, a revolt, in a sense, against actuality.
The so-called literature of escape, with its growing popularity, is in part a revolt against the tyranny of clocks.
If thinking minds, questioning minds, doubting minds, are talking about faith, their whole life will become fake.
Since the last decades of the nineteenth century, revolt against the objectified world has determined the character of art and literature.
We always come back to the same misunderstanding. The Jews because of their spirit of revolt, their exclusiveness and the Messianic tendencies which animate them are in essence revolutionaries, but they do not realize it and believe that they are working for 'progress.'...but that which they call justice is the triumph of Jewish principles in the world of which the two extremes are plutocracy and socialism. Present day Anti-Semitism is a revolt against the world of today, the product of Judaism.
...we should all fortify ourselves against the dark hours of depression by cultivating a deep distrust of the certainties of despair. Despair is relentless in the certainties of its pessimism. But we have seen again and again, from our own experience and others', that absolute statements of hopelessness that we make in the dark are notoriously unreliable. Our dark certainties are not sureties.
Thus, literature, together with language, preserves and protects a nation's soul.
The revolt against freedom, which can be traced back so far, is associated with a revolt against reason that [gives] sentiment primacy to evaluate actions and experiences according to the subjective emotions with which they are associated.
Society today is no longer in revolt against particular laws which it finds alien, unjust, and imposed, but against law as such, against the principle of law. And yet we must not regard this revolt as entirely negative. The energy that rejects many obsolete laws is an entirely positive impulse for renewal of life and law.
Louis XIV was very frank and sincere when he said: I am the State. The modern statist is modest. He says: I am the servant of the State; but, he implies, the State is God. You could revolt against a Bourbon king, and the French did it. This was, of course, a struggle of man against man. But you cannot revolt against the god State and against his humble handy man, the bureaucrat.
I've been in revolt for years against ignominy, against injustice, against inequality, against immorality, against the exploitation of human beings.
Woe to that nation whose literature is disturbed by the intervention of power. Because that is not just a violation against "freedom of print," it is the closing down of the heart of the nation, a slashing to pieces of its memory.
Doubting things go ill often hurts more
Than to be sure they do; for certainties
Either are past remedies, or, timely knowing,
The remedy then born.
To revolt is a natural tendency of life. Even a worm turns against the foot that crushes it. In general, the vitality and relative dignity of an animal can be measured by the intensity of its instinct to revolt.
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