The most disgusting cad in the world is the man who on the grounds of decorum and morality avoids the game of… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
Morality is the theory that every human act must be either right or wrong, and that 99 % of them are wrong. — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
Morality is doing what is right, no matter what you are told. Religion is doing what you are told, no matter what… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
To denounce moralizing out of hand is to pronounce a moral judgment. — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
It was morality that burned the books of the ancient sages, and morality that halted the free inquiry of the Golden Age… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
There is only one justification for having sinned, and that is to be glad of it. — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
Hygiene is the corruption of medicine by morality. It is impossible to find a hygienist who does not debase his theory of… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
There is something even more valuable to civilization than wisdom, and that is character. — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
Sin is a dangerous toy in the hands of the virtuous. It should be left to the congenitally sinful, who know when… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
The double standard of morality will survive in this world so long as the woman whose husband has been lured away is… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
Moral certainty is always a sign of cultural inferiority. The more uncivilized the man, the surer he is that he knows precisely… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
A bad artist almost always tries to conceal his incompetence by whooping up a new formula. — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
By profession a biologist, [Thomas Henry Huxley] covered in fact the whole field of the exact sciences, and then bulged through its four fences.… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
So few men are really worth knowing, that it seems a shameful waste to let an anthropoid prejudice stand in the way of free… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
Man's objection to love is that it dies hard; woman's, that when it is dead, it stays dead. — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
For it is an absurdity to call a country civilized in which a decent and industrious man, laboriously mastering a trade which is valuble… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
Women have simple tastes. They get pleasure out of the conversation of children in arms and men in love. — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
The critic, to interpret his artist, even to understand his artist, must be able to get into the mind of his artist; he must… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
There is, in fact, nothing about religious opinions that entitles them to any more respect than other opinions get. On the contrary, they tend… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image
Liberty ... was a two-headed boon. There was first, the liberty of the people as a whole to determine the forms of their own… — H. L. Mencken Copy Share Image