A Quote on Knowledge

I’ve been reading the H. L. Mencken collection mentioned in the left side bar.  Invariably, on almost every page, I end up underlining some paragraph or sentence, writing down a author’s name that Mencken praises or jotting a note, even if it only mentions that I laughed out loud when reading such and such.  My pen is always in my hand.  The following quote comes from a Mencken column, originally published in The Baltimore Evening Sun, June 29, 1925, concerning the Scopes trial and comprehension of ideas and knowledge.

"What all this amounts to is that the human race is divided into two sharply differentiated and mutually antagonistic classes, almost two genera - a small minority that plays with ideas and is capable of taking them in, and a vast majority that finds them painful, and is thus arrayed against them, and against all who have traffic with them.  The intellectual heritage of the race belongs to the minority, and to the minority only.  The majority has no more to do with it than it has to do with ecclesiastic politics on Mars.  In so far as that heritage is apprehended, it is view with enmity.  But in the main it is not apprended at all."

H.L. Mencken, The Impossible H.L. Mencken, A Selection of His Best Newspaper Stories, pg. 565 Edited By Marion Elizabeth Rodgers

Posted by on 01/02 at 01:06 PM

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