H. L. Mencken Quotes

Love is the delusion that one woman differs from another.

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

When women kiss it always reminds one of prize fighters shaking hands.

Love is the triumph of imagination over intelligence.

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

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

I never smoked a cigarette until I was nine.

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

Life is a dead-end street.

Husbands never become good; they merely become proficient.

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

A man may be a fool and not know it, but not if he is married.

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

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

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

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

Man is a beautiful machine that works very badly.

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

Adultery is the application of democracy to love.

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

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.

I believe that it is better to tell the truth than a lie. I believe it is better to be free than to be a slave. And I believe it is better to know than to be ignorant.

Every man is his own hell.

For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.

For it is mutual trust, even more than mutual interest that holds human associations together. Our friends seldom profit us but they make us feel safe. Marriage is a scheme to accomplish exactly that same end.