A newspaper is a device for making the ignorant more ignorant and the crazy crazier.
Interpretation
The quote critiques the role of newspapers in shaping public opinion, suggesting they contribute to ignorance and irrationality.
H. L. Mencken's quote reflects a critical perspective on the media, particularly newspapers, indicating that rather than educating the public, they often perpetuate ignorance and reinforce already existing irrational beliefs. This suggests that media can distort reality and manipulate audiences, highlighting the importance of critical thinking when consuming information.
In practice
Using this quote at a media literacy workshop to highlight the importance of discerning reliable sources.
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.
When common objects in this way be come charged with the suggestion of horror, they stimulate the imagination far more than things of unusual appearance; and these bushes, crowding huddled about us, assumed for me in the darkness a bizarre grotesquerie of appearance that lent to them somehow the aspect of purposeful and living creatures. Their very ordinariness, I felt, masked what was malignant and hostile to us.
Your enjoyment of the world is never right, till every morning you awake in Heaven: see yourself in your Father's palace; and look upon the skies, the earth, and the air as celestial joys: having such a reverend esteem of all, as if you were among the angels.
We know all their gods; they ignore ours. What they call our sins are our gods, and what they call their gods, we name otherwise.
They say that a kingdom is like a pyramid: the king on top and the people below. But in this country, it's upside down.
For twenty-five centuries, Western knowledge has tried to look upon the world. It has failed to understand that the world is not for the beholding. It is for hearing. It is not legible, but audible.
I believe all religions pursue the same goals, that of cultivating human goodness and bringing happiness to all human beings. Though the means might appear different the ends are the same.
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