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Marriage Quotes by H. L. Mencken

40 Marriage quotes by H. L. Mencken

All Marriage quotes H. L. Mencken’s page

H. L. Mencken paints marriage as a costly ransom that happy people pay to the devil. He jokes that marriage can make a woman think all men are easy to fool, and that a married man may finally see his own folly. He also points out that intelligent women often struggle to find a husband.

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Wife: a former sweetheart.

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

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The great secret of happiness in love is to be glad that the other fellow married her.

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

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The worst of marriage is that it makes a woman believe that all other men are just as easy to fool.

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Wife: one who is sorry she did it, but would undoubtedly do it again.

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When a husband's story is believed, he begins to suspect his wife.

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Husbands never become good; they merely become proficient.

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Alimony - the ransom that the happy pay to the devil.

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Once a woman passes a certain point in intelligence she finds it almost impossible to get a husband: she simply cannot go…

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Happiness is peace after strife, the overcoming of difficulties, the feeling of security and well-being. The only really happy folk are married…

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Once a woman passes a certain point in intelligence, it is almost impossible to get a husband: she simply cannot go on…

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

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Women in general seem to me to be appreciably more intelligent than men. A great many of them suffer in silence from…

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A woman usually respects her father, but her view of her husband is mingled with contempt, for she is of course privy…

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

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

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For it is mutual trust, even more than mutual interest that holds human associations together. Our friends seldom profit us but they…

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Capitalism undoubtedly has certain boils and blotches upon it, but has it as many as government? Has it as many as marriage?…

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Love, to the inferior man, remains almost wholly a physical matter. The heroine he most admires is the one who offers the…

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The fundamental trouble with marriage is that it shakes a man's confidence in himself, and so greatly diminishes his general competence and…

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No married woman ever trusts her husband absolutely, nor does she ever act as if she did trust him. Her utmost confidence…

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The double standard of morality will survive in this world so long as the woman whose husband has been lured away is…

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Don't tell me what delusion he entertains regarding God, or what mountebank he follows in politics, or what he springs from, or…

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The average woman must inevitably view her actual husband with a certain disdain; he is anything but her ideal. In consequence, she…

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No man could bring himself to reveal his true character, and, above all, his true limitations as a citizen and a Christian,…

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The art of politics, under democracy, is simply the art of ringing it. Two branches reveal themselves. There is the art of…

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Christian - One who is willing to serve three Gods, but draws the line at one wife.

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The worst of marriage is that it makes a woman believe that all men are just as easy to fool.

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

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A wealthy man is one who earns $100 a year more than his wife's sister's husband.

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When you sympathize with a married woman you either make two enemies or gain one wife and one friend.

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He marries best who puts it off until it is too late.

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The longest sentence you can form with two words is: I do.

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If I ever mary, it will be on a suddn impulse - as aman shoots himself

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Only a jackass ever talks over his affairs with a woman, whether she be his sweetheart, wife, or sister, or mother.

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

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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…

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I am a strict monogamist: it is twenty years since I last went to bed with two women at once, and then…

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Popularity--The capacity for listening sympathetically when men boast of their wives and women complain of their husbands.

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More by H. L. Mencken

Alimony - the ransom that the happy pay to the devil.

A bad artist almost always tries to conceal his incompetence by whooping up a new formula.

By profession a biologist, [Thomas Henry Huxley] covered in fact the whole field of the exact sciences, and then bulged through its four fences.…

So few men are really worth knowing, that it seems a shameful waste to let an anthropoid prejudice stand in the way of free…

Man's objection to love is that it dies hard; woman's, that when it is dead, it stays dead.

The lunatic fringe wags the underdog.

For it is an absurdity to call a country civilized in which a decent and industrious man, laboriously mastering a trade which is valuble…

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

The critic, to interpret his artist, even to understand his artist, must be able to get into the mind of his artist; he must…

There is, in fact, nothing about religious opinions that entitles them to any more respect than other opinions get. On the contrary, they tend…

Don't overestimate the decency of the human race.

Liberty ... was a two-headed boon. There was first, the liberty of the people as a whole to determine the forms of their own…

To the extent that I am genuinely educated, I am suspicious of all the things that the average citizen believes and the average pedagogue…

Philosophy first constructs a scheme of happiness and then tries to fit the world to it.

For it is the natural tendency of the ignorant to believe what is not true. In order to overcome that tendency it is not…