QotD: Life

As I grow older I am unpleasantly impressed by the fact that giving each human being but one life is a bad scheme. He should have two at the lowest — one for observing and studying the world, and the other for formulating and setting down his conclusions about it. Forced, as he is by the present irrational arrangement, to undertake the second function before he has made any substantial progress with the first, he limps along like an athlete only half trained. His competitors, to be sure, are in the same case, and in consequence his inadequacy tends to be concealed, but it is there none the less, and I sometimes suspect that it may be the main cause of the blowsy vacuity which marks so much of the so-called thinking of mankind.

H.L. Mencken, Minority Report, 1956.