H. L. Mencken Quotes

Morally considered, laughter is next to the Ten Commandments.

The moral world has no particular objection to vice, but an insuperable repugnance to hearing vice called by its proper name.

Official morality has always been oppressive and negative: it has said "thou shalt not," and has not troubled to investigate the effect of activities not forbidden by the code.

Morality represents for everybody a thoroughly definite and ascertained idea: the idea of human conduct regulated in a certain manner.

At times, morality can be dismissed as a matter of personal conscience, no matter how widespread its acceptance. Ethics, on the other hand, arises from societal or group commitments to principia of behavior.

It is difficult for me to regard anyone who obeys no moral principle in his conduct to be a religious man.

Morality's not practical. Morality's a gesture. A complicated gesture learnt from books.

If throughout your life you abstain from murder, theft, fornication, perjury, blasphemy, and disrespect toward your parents, church, and your king, you are conventionally held to deserve moral admiration even if you have never done a single kind, generous or useful action. This very inadequate notion of virtue is an outcome of taboo morality, and has done untold harm.

Morality is the thing upon which your friends smile, and immorality is the thing upon which they frown

I've no objection to morality, except that it's obsolete.

The so-called new morality is too often the old immorality condoned.

To claim that theft or adultery or lying are "evil" simply reflects our degraded idea of good-—that it has something to do with respect for property, respectability, and sincerity.

Morals - all correct moral laws - derive from the instinct to survive. Moral behavior is survival behavior above the individual level.

The very essence of our civilization is that we give a paramount place to morality in all our affairs, public or private.

For many people, morality means a set of rules governing the disposition on one's genital organs; or a set of injunctions against lying, stealing, or killing except when such acts are sanctioned by church or state.

Hypocrisy is an homage that vice renders to virtue.

moral, adj. Conforming to a local and mutable standard of right. Having the quality of general expediency.

A man may not transgress the bounds of major morals, but may make errors in minor morals.

Perhaps the most significant moral characteristic of a nation is its hypocrisy.

There can be no question of holding forth on ethics. I have seen people behave badly with great morality and I note every day that integrity has no need of rules

A concern with 'public morality' is - if not the last refuge of a scoundrel - the first foray of the fascist.

I must affirm that it is just as wrong, or perhaps even more so, to use moral means to preserve immoral ends.

There can be no high civility without a deep morality, though it may not always call itself by that name.

There'd be a lot less scandal if people didn't idealize sin and pose as sinners.

Tis certain that Morality is an indispensable Requisite of true Religion, and there can be none without it. But it would become the Pride and Ignorance of Pagans only, to magnify it, as the Whole of what is necessary.