H. L. Mencken Quotes

The average man never really thinks from end to end of his life. The mental activity of such people is only a mouthing of cliches. What they mistake for thought is simply a repetition of what they have heard. My guess is that well over 80 percent of the human race goes through life without having a single original thought.

No amount of energy will take the place of thought. A strenuous life with its eyes shut is a kind of wild insanity.

Thinking isn't something you think about. It comes naturally. Thinking involves many things. It involves being an observer. It involves analyzing things, taking in what's around you in the world and finding how to make it inspire your work or turn it into a lesson to teach your children; it's paying attention to details. That's what thinking is: processing.

When people look only at the surface and that satisfies them and they think from that surface they see, that is to be truly blind.

Worship God. It’s easier than thinking.

People habituate themselves to let things pass through their minds, as one may speak, rather than to think of them. Thus by use they become satisfied merely with seeing what is said, without going any further. Review and attention, and even forming a judgment, becomes fatigue; and to lay anything before them that requires it, is putting them quite out of their way.

... we must read, not only for what we read but for what it makes us think.

Most people wish to be consoled, confirmed. They want their prejudices reinforced and their structured belief systems validated. After all, it hurts to think, and it's absolute agony to think twice.

Nothing pains some people more than having to think

Always it is thus with my new students, and especially with the human ones; the mind is the last muscle they train or use, and the one that they regard the least. Ask them about swordplay and they can list every blow from a duel a month old, but ask them to solve a problem or make a coherent statement and... well, I would be lucky to get more than a blank stare in return.

I have a great affection for people who are intellectually engaged with the world, and who don't treat everything superficially. And I think, when people talk about nerdiness, what they're really talking about is smart people who who are trying to think hard about the world. And I don't think that's an insult, I think that's a great thing.

The man who doesn’t make up his mind to cultivate the habit of thinking misses the greatest pleasure in life.

So little trouble do men take in the search after truth; so readily do they accept whatever comes first to hand.

For in the end, he was trying to tell us what afflicted the people in 'Brave New World' was not that they were laughing instead of thinking, but that they did not know what they were laughing about and why they had stopped thinking.

I'm against ignorance. I'm against sloppy, emotional thinking. I'm against fashionable thinking. I am against the whole cliché of the moment.

...most people in the world don't really use their brains to think. And people who don't think are the ones who don't listen to others.

Thinking nurseth thinking.

We can't stand silence, because silence induces thinking. And if we thought, we would have to face ourselves.

It is always much easier, I have discovered, to make people cry or gasp than to make them think.

I'd like to be seen as an average Australian bloke. I can't think of... I can't think of a nobler description of anybody than to be called an average Australian bloke.

It is better to emit a scream in the shape of a theory than to be entirely insensible to the jars and incongruities of life and take everything as it comes in a forlorn stupidity.

To accept opinions is to gain the good solid feeling of being correct without having to think.

Broad-minded is just another way of saying a fellow is too lazy to form an opinion.

An essential part of power is the freedom not to think too deeply

I've always thought comparisons were useless and ugly. It is a short cut to thinking.