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.
All of our actions have in their doing the seed of their undoing. ... That in her creation of her children there should be the unspeakable promise of their death, for by their birth she had created mortal beings.
In anything that does cover the whole of your life - in your philosophy and your religion - you must have mirth. If you do not have mirth you will certainly have madness.
Few people arise in the morning as hungry for God as they are for cornflakes or toast and eggs.
The grief of the keen is no personal complaint for the death of one woman over eighty years, but seems to contain the whole passionate rage that lurks somewhere in every native of the island.
If a strong government finds that it can, with impunity, destroy a weak people, then the hour has struck for that weak people to appeal to the League of Nations to give its judgment in all freedom. God and history will remember your judgment.
My hypothesis is that for people who are both trained and inclined to think in rigorously logical ways, it is particularly difficult to adapt to the Soviet system of doublethink.
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