Explanations exist; they have existed for all time; there is always a well-known solution to every human problem — neat, plausible, and wrong.
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"The Divine Afflatus" in New York Evening Mail (16 November 1917); later published in Prejudices: Second Series (1920) and A Mencken Chrestomathy (1949)H. L. Mencken
» H. L. Mencken - all quotes »
Every human being has two religions. The first is the religion of the body which ceases to exist after death. The second is the religion of the soul, which has existed since the beginning of time, the Love of God. It is by this religion that a human being is exalted.
Riaz Ahmed Gohar Shahi
If Perl is the solution, you're solving the wrong problem.
Erik Naggum
Some philosophers have believed that a philosophical clarification of space also provided a solution of the problem of time. Kant presented space and time as analogous forms of visualization and treated them in a common chapter in his major epistemological work. Time therefore seems to be much less problematic since it has none of the difficulties resulting from multidimensionality. Time does not have the problem of mirror-image congruence, i.e., the problem of equal and similarly shaped figures that cannot be superimposed, a problem that has played some role in Kant's philosophy. Furthermore, time has no problem analogous to non-Euclidean geometry. In a one-dimensional schema it is impossible to distinguish between straightness and curvature. ...A line may have external curvature but never an internal one, since this possibility exists only for a two-dimensional or higher continuum. Thus time lacks, because of its one-dimensionality, all those problems which have led to philosophical analysis of the problems of space.
Hans Reichenbach
The problem with the religious solution [to philosophical problems] was stated by Mencken when he wrote, 'Theology is the effort to explain the unknowable in terms of the not worth knowing.' For anyone with a persistent intellectual curiosity, religious explanations are not worth knowing because they pile equally baffling enigmas on top of the original ones. What gave God a mind, free will, knowledge, certainty about right and wrong? How does he infuse them into a universe that seems to run just fine according to physical laws? How does he get ghostly souls to interact with hard matter? And most perplexing of all, if the world unfolds according to a wise and merciful plan, why does it contain so much suffering? As the Yiddish expression says, If God lived on earth, people would break his windows.
Steven Pinker
A science fiction story is a story built around human beings, with a human problem and a human solution, which would not have happened at all without its scientific content.
Theodore Sturgeon
Mencken, H. L.
Mendeleev, Dmitri
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