Henry Louis Mencken Quotes

Husbands never become good; they merely become proficient.

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

Husband: A No. 16 neck in a No. 15 1/2 collar.

One of the things every man discovers to his disquiet is that his wife, after the first play-acting is over, regards him essentially as his mother used to regard him – that is, as a self-worshiper who needs to be policed and an idiot who need to be protected. The notion that women “admire” their […]

The average woman must inevitably view her actual husband with a certain disdain; he is anything but her ideal. In consequence, she cannot help feeling that her children are cruelly handicapped by the fact that he is their father.

But of all things that a woman gains by marriage the most valuable is economic security. Such security, of course, is seldom absolute, but usually merely relative: the best provider among husbands may die without enough life insurance, or run off with some preposterous light of love, or become an invalid or insane, or step […]

What is esteemed and valuable, in our materialistic and unintelligent society, is precisely that petty practical efficiency at which men are expert, and which serves them in place of free intelligence. A woman, save she show a masculine strain that verges upon the pathological, cannot hope to challenge men in general in this department, but […]

But there are other benefits, too. One of them is that increase in dignity which goes with an obvious success; the woman who has got herself a satisfactory husband, or even a highly imperfect husband, is regarded with respect by other women, and has a contemptuous patronage for those who have failed to do likewise.

The obvious fact that human beings are not naturally humane – that they take a keen delight in cruelty whenever it seems to be safe.

Here, then, I arrive at that doctrine of human rights which seems to me to be most in accord with the inflexible and beneficient laws of nature… Of these rights there are two classes – first, those which a man (or a class of men) wrests from his environment by force; and secondly, those which […]