A Quote by H. L. Mencken
Men become civilized, not in proportion to their willingness to believe, but in their readiness to doubt.
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Men become civilized, not in proportion to their willingness to believe, but in proportion to their readiness to doubt.
The money men make from their willingness to work the least desirable hours is not a sign of discrimination against women, but a sign of the willingness of mostly married men to lose sleep to support the family as their wife loses sleep to feed the child. A willingness to do the uncomfortable shifts is one reason married men earn more than twice what never-married men earn. Men's contribution, made at night, need not be lost in the dark.
Because that's what intimacy is: It's a willingness to be vulnerable, a willingness to bite my tongue and a willingness to set an example of what I believe in.
The most considerable difference I note among men is not in their readiness to fall into error, but in their readiness to acknowledge these inevitable lapses.
...men can only be highly civilized while other men, inevitably less civilized, are there to guard and feed them.
Among the laws controlling human societies there is one more precise and clearer, it seems to me, than all the others. If men are to remain civilized or to become civilized, the art of association must develop and improve among them at the same speed as equality of conditions spreads.
Assuming China does not become destabilized and continues to grow, it will no doubt develop a military program in proportion to its resources.
When you have civilized men fighting savages, you support the civilized men, no matter who they are.
The assistance you need will be provided by the universe as soon as you convert your readiness to willingness.
When men can no longer be theists, they must, if they are civilized, become humanists.
With savages, the weak in body or mind are soon eliminated. We civilized men, on the other hand, do our utmost to check the process of elimination. We build asylums for the imbecile, the maimed and the sick. Thus the weak members of civilized societies propagate their kind. No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man. Hardly anyone is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed.
We cannot hope to be secure when our government has declared, by its readiness to act alone, its willingness to be everybody's enemy.
Almighty God freely bestows the good things in this world in proportion to a person's mental readiness to receive.
A day will come when the civilized world will deny its God, when the Church will doubt as Peter doubted. She will be tempted to believe that man has become God. In our churches, Christians will search in vain for the red lamp where God awaits them. Like Mary Magdalene, weeping before the empty tomb, they will ask, ‘Where have they taken Him?’
We must open our eyes and see that modern civilization has become so complex and the lives of civilized men so interwoven with thelives of other men in other countries as to make it impossible to be in this world and out of it.
I believe that Western civilization, after some disgusting glitches, has become almost civilized. I believe it is our first duty to protect that civilization. I believe it is our second duty to improve it. I believe it is our third duty to extend it if we can.
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