The objection to Puritans is not that they try to make us think as they do, but that they try to make us do as they think.
Interpretation
This quote criticizes the Puritans for imposing their beliefs on others, advocating for freedom of thought over forced action.
H. L. Mencken's quote highlights the fundamental issue with groups like the Puritans who do not merely seek to influence our thoughts but rather aim to dictate our actions based on their own beliefs. It underscores the importance of individual freedom, suggesting that true intellectual engagement should allow people to think independently rather than conform to the prescribed actions of a particular ideology or group.
In practice
In a debate about personal freedom, one might use this quote to illustrate the importance of independent thought.
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.
Death, I need my little addiction to you. I need that tiny voice who, even as I rise from the sea, all woman, all there, says kill me, kill me.
Yes, I know it. In the darkness of my dark beating heart, I know. He'd have loved it alright. You see? Even Death Has A Heart.
Let us think of people as starting life with an experience they forget and ending it with one which they anticipate but cannot understand.
And so everything I see in this world, it all moves backward and forward at the same time, like a black-smith's bellows, like everything in my press, turning into its opposite at the command of the red and green buttons, and that's what makes the world go round.
Color is not a human or a personal reality; it is a political reality.
All lives are composed of two basic elements," the squirrel said, "purpose and poetry. By being ourselves, squirrel and raven, we fulfill the first requirement, you in flight and I in my tree. But there is poetry in the meanest of lives, and if we leave it unsought we leave ourselves unrealized. A life without food, without shelter, without love, a life lived in the rainβthis is nothing beside a life without poetry.
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