I detest converts almost as much as I do missionaries.
Interpretation
The quote expresses disdain for those who aggressively promote beliefs or persuade others to convert to their perspective.
H. L. Mencken highlights a critical view of both converts and missionaries, suggesting that he finds both groups tedious and overly zealous in their efforts to spread their beliefs. This reflects a broader skepticism about the authenticity of converted beliefs and the motives of those who seek to influence others to adopt their views.
In practice
During a debate on religious conversion, this quote could serve as a strong opener to express skepticism.
I know a good many men of great learning-that is, men born with an extraordinary eagerness and capacity to acquire knowledge. One and all, they tell me that they can't recall learning anything of any value in school. All that schoolmasters managed to accomplish with them was to test and determine the amount of knowledge that they had already acquired independently-and not infrequently the determination was made clumsily and inaccurately.
It takes a long while for a naturally trustful person to reconcile himself to the idea that after all God will not help him
It is the theory of all modern civilized governments that they protect and foster the liberty of the citizen; it is the practice of all of them to limit its exercise, and sometimes very narrowly.
The central belief of every moron is that he is the victim of a mysterious conspiracy against his common rights and true deserts.
The cure for the evils of democracy is more democracy.
It is my conviction that no normal man ever fell in love, within the ordinary meaning of the term, after the age of thirty.
The layman always means, when he says "reality" that he is speaking of something self-evidently known; whereas to me it seems the most important and exceedingly difficult task of our time is to work on the construction of a new idea of reality.
Time is not a thing, thus nothing which is, and yet it remains constant in its passing away without being something temporal like the beings in time.
Words bend our thinking to infinite paths of self-delusion, and the fact that we spend most of our mental lives in brain mansions built of words means that we lack the objectivity necessary to see the terrible distortion of reality which language brings.
Now everything is wonderful and hazardous and nothing's hypothetical.
Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it. The river was cut by the world's great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time. On some of the rocks are timeless raindrops. Under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs. I am haunted by waters.
What is government itself but the greatest of all reflections on human nature?
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