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The difference between a moral man and a man of honor is that the latter regrets a discreditable act, even when it has worked and he has not been caught.

H. L. Mencken

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H. L. Mencken
Age: 75 †
Born: 1880
Born: September 12
Died: 1956
Died: January 29
Autobiographer
Essayist
Historian
Journalist
Linguist
Literary Critic
Satirist
Social Critic
Writer
Baltimore
Maryland
Henry Louis Mencken
Men
Regret
Worked
Honor
Discreditable
Difference
Regrets
Differences
Latter
Moral
Ethics
Character
Caught
Even
Morality

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To wage a war for a purely moral reason is as absurd as to ravish a woman for a purely moral reason
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Whenever A attempts by law to impose his moral standards upon B, A is most likely a scoundrel.
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Why do men delight in work? Fundamentally, I suppose, because there is a sense of relief and pleasure in getting something done - a kind of satisfaction not unlike that which a hen enjoys on laying an egg.
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No married man is genuinely happy if he has to drink worse whisky than he used to drink when he was single.
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There is nothing worse than an idle hour, with no occupation offering. People who have many such hours are simply animals waiting docilely for death. We all come to that state soon or late. It is the curse of senility.
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There is always a well-known solution to every human problem - neat, plausible, and wrong.
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When fanatics are on top there is no limit to oppression.
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The final test of truth is ridicule. Very few dogmas have ever faced it and survived.
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A man loses his sense of direction after four drinks a woman loses hers after four kisses.
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All great religions, in order to escape absurdity, have to admit a dilution of agnosticism. It is only the savage, whether of the African bush or the American gospel tent, who pretends to know the will and intent of God exactly and completely.
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No healthy man, in his secret heart, is content with his destiny. He is tortured by dreams and images as a child is tortured by the thought of a state of existence in which it would live in a candy store and have two stomachs.
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Truth would quickly cease to be stranger than fiction, once we got as used to it.
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The editors are committed to nothing save this: to keep common sense as fast as they can, to belabor sham as agreeably as possible, to give civilized entertainment.
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The penalty for laughing in a courtroom is six months in jail if it were not for this penalty, the jury would never hear the evidence.
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The most popular man under a democracy is not the most democratic man, but the most despotic man. The common folk delight in the exactions of such a man. They like him to boss them. Their natural gait is the goose step.
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Say what you will about the ten commandments, you must always come back to the pleasant fact that there are only ten of them.
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Strike an average between what a woman thinks of her husband a month before she marries him and what she thinks of him a year afterward, and you will have the truth about him.
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The average man gets his living by such depressing devices that boredom becomes a sort of natural state to him.
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Shave a gorilla and it would be almost impossible, at twenty paces, to distinguish him from a heavyweight champion of the world. Skin a chimpanzee, and it would take an autopsy to prove he was not a theologian.
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