H. L. Mencken Quotes

If the Coastal Republic had believed in the existence of virtue, it could at least have aspired to hypocrisy.

...virtue is not merely a state in conformity with the right principle, but one that implies the right principle; and the right principle in moral conduct is prudence.

What is the real relation between happiness and goodness? It is only within a few generations that men have found courage to say that there is none.

I have yet to meet a man as fond of high moral conduct as he is of outward appearances.

If vices were profitable, the virtuous man would be the sinner.

It is much more intelligent, more practical, to be good rather than evil.

The only word for goodness is goodness, and it is not enough.

Goodness without wisdom always accomplishes evil.

Virtue is nothing but an act of loving that which is to be beloved, and that act is prudence, from whence not to be removed by constraint is fortitude; not to be allured by enticements is temperance; not to be diverted by pride is justice.

We care about moral issues, nobility, decency, happiness, goodness—the issues that matter in the real world, but which can only be addressed, in their purity, in fiction.

In ethics, prudence is not an important virtue, but in the world it is almost everything.

The order of nature [is] that individual happiness shall be inseparable from the practice of virtue.

Self-denial is not a virtue; it is only the effect of prudence on rascality.

[T]here is no truth more thoroughly established, than that there exists . . . an indissoluble union between virtue and happiness.

Is not virtue a negation of becoming?

I have seen men incapable of the sciences, but never any incapable of virtue.

A man may be very sincere in good principles, without having good practice.

To be good and disagreeable is high treason against the royalty of virtue.

Moralism doesn't produce morality; it produces immorality.

Morality is truth in full bloom.

It still remains true that no justification of virtue will enable a man to be virtuous.

Sensibility appears to me to be neither good nor evil in itself, but in its application. Under the influence of Christian principle, it makes saints and martyrs; ill-directed, or uncontrolled, it is a snare, and the source of every temptation; besides, as people cannot get it if it is not given them, to descant on it seems to me as idle as to recommend people to have black eyes or fair complexions.

When goodness is lost, it is replaced by morality.

A person may be qualified to do greater good to mankind and become more beneficial to the world, by morality without faith than by faith without morality.