Don't overestimate the decency of the human race.
Interpretation
This quote suggests that one should not assume that humans are inherently good or decent.
H. L. Mencken's quote serves as a caution against naively believing that humanity is fundamentally virtuous. It implies that while many people may exhibit kindness and morality, there is also a significant capacity for selfishness and immorality, urging a more realistic and sometimes skeptical view of human nature.
In practice
In a discussion about human behavior in sociology class.
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 search for total knowledge starts from the Self and finds its fulfillment in coming back to the Self, finding that everything is the expression of the Self - everything is the expression of my own Self.
Every person passing through this life will unknowingly leave something and take something away. Most of this “something” cannot be seen or heard or numbered or scientifically detected or counted. It’s what we leave in the minds of other people and what they leave in ours. Memory. The census doesn’t count it. Nothing counts without it.
The answer is never the answer. What's really interesting is the mystery. If you seek the mystery instead of the answer, you'll always be seeking. I've never seen anybody really find the answer, but they think they have. So they stop thinking. But the job is to seek mystery, evoke mystery, plant a garden in which strange plants grow and mysteries bloom. The need for mystery is greater than the need for an answer.
Think how different human societies would be if they were based on love rather than justice. But no such societies have ever existed on earth.
In this breaking-through, I receive that God and I are one. Then I am what I was, and then I neither diminish nor increase, for I am then an immovable cause that moves all things.
The Soul of each one of us is sent, that the universe may be complete.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.