It is even harder for the average ape to believe that he has descended from man.
Interpretation
The quote highlights the struggle of accepting evolution and our origins in a humorous manner.
H. L. Mencken's quote satirically points out the irony and difficulty many face when contemplating the concept of evolution, suggesting that it might be more believable for an ape to consider itself descended from humans than for humans to accept their own descent from a more primitive ancestor. This underscores the inherent challenges in reconciling our understanding of human evolution with personal beliefs.
In practice
In a debate about evolution where the topic prompts 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 superiority of one man's opinion over another's is never so great as when the opinion is about a woman.
People almost invariably arrive at their beliefs not on the basis of proof but on the basis of what they find attractive.
If you belonged to a political party or a social club that was tied to as much bigotry, misogyny, homophobia, violence, and sheer ignorance as religion is, you'd resign in protest.
His overriding life necessity was not love, it was his profession…He had come to medicine not by coincidence or calculation but by a deep inner desire. Insofar as it is possible to divide people into categories, the surest criterion is the deep-seated desires that orient them to one or another lifelong activity. Every Frenchman is different. But all the actors the world over are similar.
It's a very naive idea to think that the chef is cooking everything, and, on top of it, is irreplaceable. That would mean that basically he is the only genius, and there are idiots all around him, which doesn't make sense.
In coming to understand anything we are rejecting the facts as they are for us in favour of the facts as they are.
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