H. L. Mencken Quotes

Sin then is not a toy with which to play but a terror to be shunned.

Most men are more willing to indulge in easy vices than to practise laborious virtues.

It is not enough to recognize what is right and true. One must control the impulse to do what is wrong and easy.

Where there is no temptation, there is no virtue.

If you do not know the laws of right conduct, you cannot form your character.

Man must choose either of the two courses, the upward or the downward; but as he has the brute in him, he will more easily choose the downward course than the upward, especially when the downward course is presented to him in a beautiful garb. Man easily capitulates when sin is presented in the garb of virtue.

Civilization is that mode of conduct which points out to man the path of duty. Performance of duty and observance of morality are convertible terms. To observe morality is to attain mastery over our mind and our passions. So doing, we know ourselves.

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

Temptation is not a sin but playing with temptation invites sin.

If I am virtuous and worthy, for whom should I not maintain a proper concern?

A fool is a person who knows the difference between right and wrong, and chooses to do wrong.

One of the greatest artifices the devil uses to engage men in vice and debauchery, is to fasten names of contempt on certain virtues, and thus fill weak souls with a foolish fear of passing for scrupulous, should they desire to put them in practice.

I try to do the right thing.

Well, every little boy thinks he invented sin. Virtue we think we learn, because we are told about it. But sin is our own designing.

A man is not to aim at innocence, any more than he is to aim at hair, but he is to keep it.

Of all evil I deem you capable: therefore I want the good from you.

Sin and shame ever go together; he that would be freed from the last must be sure to shun the company of the first.

What we take for virtue is often nothing but an assemblage of different actions, and of different interests, that fortune or our industry knows how to arrange.

You are wrong, sir, if you think that a man who is any good at all should take into account the risk of life or death; he should look to this only in his actions, whether what he does is right or wrong, whether he is acting like a good or a bad man.

What we take for virtue is often but an assemblage of various ambitions and activities that chance, or our own astuteness, have arranged in a certain manner; and it is not always out of courage or purity that men are brave, and women chaste.

A lady could not boast of her chastity who was never tempted.

Temptations make one very censorious. If you are virtuous you condemn the wicked and if you are wicked, you condemn the virtuous.

Wickedness is always easier than virtue; for it takes the short cut to everything.

Little sins carry with them but little temptations to sin, and then a man shews most viciousness and unkindness, when he sins on a little temptation. It is devilish to sin without a temptation; it is little less than devilish to sin on a little occasion. The less the temptation is to sin, the greater is that sin.

A man who is good for anything ought not to calculate the chance of living or dying; he ought only to consider whether in doing anything he is doing right or wrong - acting the part of a good man or of a bad.