Men become civilized, not in proportion to their willingness to believe, but in their readiness to doubt.
Interpretation
Civilization grows from questioning rather than blind belief.
H. L. Mencken's quote underscores the importance of skepticism and critical thinking in the development of civilization. Rather than simply accepting ideas and beliefs without question, he suggests that a willingness to doubt and interrogate these beliefs leads to a more civilized and enlightened society.
In practice
In a discussion about the importance of science, one might quote Mencken to highlight the need for 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 judge who sits over the murderer and looks into his face, and at one moment recognizes all the emotions and potentialities and possibilities of the murderer in his own soul and hears the murderer's voice as his own, is at the next moment one and indivisible as the judge, and scuttles back into the shell of his cultivated self and does his duty and condemns the murderer to death.
Iβve often wondered where Jesus would apply His hastily made whip if He were to visit our culture. My guess is that it would not be money-changing tables in the temple that would feel His wrath, but the display racks in Christian bookstores.
It is usual to think of good and evil as two poles, two opposite directions, the antithesis of one another...We must begin by doing away with this convention.
[The Pope] will make the king believe that three are only one, that the bread he eats is not bread... and a thousand other things of the same kind.
Jacob did not cease to be a Saint because he had to attend to his flocks.
We build buildings based on the false assumption that women go to mosques half as much as they actually do. In fact, the US is the only country in the world where women and men report that they attend the mosque in equal numbers, but our institutions aren't representing this reality.
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