H. L. Mencken Quotes

But we all recognise the primary foible of frail humanity - our propensity for embracing hope and shunning logic, our tendency to believe what we desire rather than what we observe.

You can't reason people out of beliefs they weren't reasoned into.

A person who believes that Elvis is still alive is very unlikely to get promoted to a position of great power and responsibility in our society. Neither will a person who believes that the holocaust was a hoax. But people who believe equally irrational things about God and the bible are now running our country. This is genuinely terrifying.

There isn't anything so grotesque or so incredible that the average human being can't believe it.

For what a man would like to be true, that he more readily believes.

Man is not logical and his intellectual history is a record of mental reserves and compromises. He hangs on to what he can in his old beliefs even when he is compelled to surrender their logical basis.

We believe easily what we fear of what we desire

Failure to believe stems from moral failure to recognize the truth, not from want of evidence, but from willful neglect or distortion of the evidence.

Human beings will believe in all kinds of things that aren't true, and that's okay. And TV is a part of that.

If two things don't fit, but you believe both of them, thinking that somewhere, hidden, there must be a third thing that connects them, that's credulity.

If you believe something enough, it comes true eventually, and that's so true even with lies. If you tell yourself a lie, after a few years you'll think it's true.

People may believe correct things for the damndest and weirdest of wrong reasons.

People readily believe what they want to believe.

True, you don't have to be religious to be crazy, but it helps. Indeed, if you are religious, you don't have to be crazy in the medically certifiable sense in order to do massively crazy things.

I believe that people believe what they believe they believe.

The average man does not get pleasure out of an idea because he thinks it is true; he thinks it is true because he gets pleasure out of it.

What a man wishes, he will believe.

There is nothing so absurd or ridiculous that has not at some time been said by some philosopher. Fontenelle says he would undertake to persuade the whole public of readers to believe that the sun was neither the cause of light or heat, if he could only get six philosophers on his side.

Facts mean little compared to attitudes. To contradict rumor or sentiment is as futile as arguing against a believer's faith in the Immaculate Conception. You have simply become a victim of faith, Comrade Assistant.

We are all hunting for rational reasons for believing in the absurd.

Our conscious motivations, ideas, and beliefs are a blend of false information, biases, irrational passions, rationalizations, prejudices, in which morsels of truth swim around and give the reassurance albeit false, that the whole mixture is real and true. The thinking processes attempt to organize this whole cesspool of illusions according to the laws of plausibility. This level of consciousness is supposed to reflect reality; it is the map we use for organizing our life.

Men turn their faces to hell, and hope to get to heaven; why don't they walk into the horsepond, and hope to be dry?.

Why is it people who want the truth never believe it when they hear it?

People are stupid... They will believe a lie because they want to believe it's true, or because they're afraid it might be true.

Our nature is to desperately want to believe and to take what we believe is the quickest path there even against our better judgment.