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Exlpore more Ethics quotes
"The real trouble is that 'kindness' is a quality fatally easy to attribute to ourselves on quite inadequate grounds. Everyone feels benevolent if nothing happens to be annoying him at the moment. Thus a man easily comes to console himself for all his other vices by a conviction that 'his heart's in the right place' and 'he wouldn't hurt a fly,' though in fact he has never made the slightest sacrifice for a fellow creature. We think we are kind when we are only happy: it is not so easy, on the same grounds, to imagine oneself temperate, chaste, or humble."
"By failing to live by the letter of the texts, while tolerating the irrationality of those who do, religious moderates betray faith and reason equally."
"At certain moments, the foot slips ; at others, the ground gives way. How many times had that conscience, furious for the right, grasped and overwhelmed him! How many times had truth, inexorable, planted her knee upon his breast! How many times, thrown to the ground by the light, had he cried to it for mercy!"
"Paying attention to the ethical implications of our choices has never been more pressing-or more complicated-than it is today."
Explore more quotes by H. L. Mencken
"Nietzsche, an infinitely harder and more courageous intellect, was incapable of any such confusion of ideas; he seldom allowed sentimentality to turn him from the glaring fact."
"To die for an idea; it is unquestionably noble. But how much nobler it would be if men died for ideas that were true!"
"Indeed it may be said with some confidence that the average man never really thinks from end to end of his life. There are moments when his cogitations are relatively more respectable than usual, but even at their climaxes they never reach anything properly describable as the level of serious thought. The mental activity of such people is only a mouthing of clichés. What they mistake for thought is simply a repetition of what they have heard. My guess is that well over eighty per cent. of the human race goes through life without having a single original thought. That is to say, they never think anything that has not been thought before and by thousands."
"Every normal man must be tempted, at times, to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats."
"No matter how happily a woman may be married, it always pleases her to discover that there is a nice man who wishes that she were not."
"Explanations exist; they have existed for all time; there is always a well-known solution to every human problem-neat, plausible, and wrong."
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