H. L. Mencken Quotes | GloryQuotes

H. L. Mencken Quotes About Women

No matter how long he lives, no man ever becomes as wise as the average woman of forty-eight.

Women have simple tastes. They get pleasure out of the conversation of children in arms and men in love.

Men have a much better time of it than women. For one thing, they marry later; for another thing, they die earlier.

To be in love is merely to be in a state of perceptual anesthesia - to mistake an ordinary young woman for a goddess.

Women always excel men in that sort of wisdom which comes from experience. To be a woman is in itself a terrible experience.

In the duel of sex woman fights from a dreadnought and man from an open raft.

Man is always looking for someone to boast to; woman is always looking for a shoulder to put her head on.

A bad man is the sort who weeps every time he speaks of a good woman.

H. L. Mencken Quotes About Love

Whenever you hear a man speak of his love for his country, it is a sign that he expects to be paid for it.

Love is an emotion that is based on an opinion of women that is impossible for those who have had any experience with them.

A man always remembers his first love with special tenderness, but after that he begins to bunch them.

Love is the delusion that one woman differs from another.

Love is like war: easy to begin but very hard to stop.

Adultery is the application of democracy to love.

Love is the triumph of imagination over intelligence.

More Quotes by H. L. Mencken

A Sunday school is a prison in which children do penance for the evil conscience of their parents.

It doesn't take a majority to make a rebellion; it takes only a few determined leaders and a sound cause.

Whenever a husband and wife begin to discuss their marriage they are giving evidence at a coroner's inquest.

To die for an idea; it is unquestionably noble. But how much nobler it would be if men died for ideas that were true!

Wealth - any income that is at least one hundred dollars more a year than the income of one's wife's sister's husband.

I believe that all government is evil, and that trying to improve it is largely a waste of time.

Giving every man a vote has no more made men wise and free than Christianity has made them good.

All men are frauds. The only difference between them is that some admit it. I myself deny it.

No man ever quite believes in any other man. One may believe in an idea absolutely, but not in a man.

Democracy is the art and science of running the circus from the monkey cage.

No married man is genuinely happy if he has to drink worse whisky than he used to drink when he was single.

I believe in only one thing: liberty; but I do not believe in liberty enough to want to force it upon anyone.

A prohibitionist is the sort of man one couldn't care to drink with, even if he drank.

War will never cease until babies begin to come into the world with larger cerebrums and smaller adrenal glands.

It is hard to believe that a man is telling the truth when you know that you would lie if you were in his place.

Man weeps to think that he will die so soon; woman, that she was born so long ago.

Nevertheless, it is even harder for the average ape to believe that he has descended from man.

The chief contribution of Protestantism to human thought is its massive proof that God is a bore.

The chief value of money lies in the fact that one lives in a world in which it is overestimated.

For centuries, theologians have been explaining the unknowable in terms of the-not-worth-knowing.

Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance.

I confess I enjoy democracy immensely. It is incomparably idiotic, and hence incomparably amusing.

Democracy is only a dream: it should be put in the same category as Arcadia, Santa Claus, and Heaven.

Nine times out of ten, in the arts as in life, there is actually no truth to be discovered; there is only error to be exposed.

A society made up of individuals who were all capable of original thought would probably be unendurable.

Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.

If women believed in their husbands they would be a good deal happier and also a good deal more foolish.

Temptation is an irresistible force at work on a movable body.

Platitude: an idea (a) that is admitted to be true by everyone, and (b) that is not true.

Faith may be defined briefly as an illogical belief in the occurrence of the improbable.

Morality is the theory that every human act must be either right or wrong, and that 99 % of them are wrong.

The only really happy folk are married women and single men.

Bachelors know more about women than married men; if they didn't they'd be married too.

Every man sees in his relatives, and especially in his cousins, a series of grotesque caricatures of himself.

Nobody ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public.

A cynic is a man who, when he smells flowers, looks around for a coffin.

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.

The common argument that crime is caused by poverty is a kind of slander on the poor.

Every normal man must be tempted, at times, to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats.

Theology is the effort to explain the unknowable in terms of the not worth knowing.

I write in order to attain that feeling of tension relieved and function achieved which a cow enjoys on giving milk.

The older I grow the more I distrust the familiar doctrine that age brings wisdom.

Marriage is a wonderful institution, but who would want to live in an institution?

Self-respect: the secure feeling that no one, as yet, is suspicious.

Puritanism. The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.

A church is a place in which gentlemen who have never been to heaven brag about it to persons who will never get there.

I go on working for the same reason that a hen goes on laying eggs.

Unquestionably, there is progress. The average American now pays out twice as much in taxes as he formerly got in wages.

Browse 148 quotes attributed to H. L. Mencken, listed in the source data as a American Writer, organized around themes such as Women, Love, Wisdom. Use the topic links to explore similar quotes, or browse the full author collection in one place.