Truth would quickly cease to be stranger than fiction, once we got as used to it.
Interpretation
Truth can be as surprising as fiction when we become accustomed to it.
H. L. Mencken's quote suggests that what we often consider as truth can become as surprising or implausible as fiction, depending on our understanding and acceptance of reality. It invites reflection on how we perceive truth and the narratives we create around it, emphasizing that our familiarity can sometimes dull our sense of wonder towards the genuine complexities of life.
In practice
In a discussion about the nature of reality and fiction, this quote can be invoked to illustrate how strange truths can appear.
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.
Conscience is the internal perception of the rejection of a particular wish operating within us.
Strife and Confusion joined the fight, along with cruel Death, who seized one wounded man while still alive and then another man without a wound, while pulling the feet of one more corpse out from the fight. The clothes Death wore around her shoulders were dyed red with human blood.
Just as Darwin discovered the law of evolution in organic nature, so Marx discovered the law of evolution in human history; he discovered the simple fact, hitherto concealed by an overgrowth of idealogy [sic], that mankind must first of all eat and drink, have shelter and clothing, before it can pursue politics, science, religion, art etc.
A Religion of Evolution: that, when all is said and done, is what Man needs ever more explicitly if he is to survive and 'superlive,' as soon as he becomes conscious of his power to ultra-hominize himself and of his duty to do so.
Perhaps weβve never been visited by aliens because they have looked upon earth and decided thereβs no sign of intelligent life.
Legislators invent too many devices for subdividing property, only taking care to let their subdivisions go hand in hand with the natural affections of the human mind.
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