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

H. L. Mencken

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H. L. Mencken
Age: 75 †
Born: 1880
Born: September 12
Died: 1956
Died: January 29
Autobiographer
Essayist
Historian
Journalist
Linguist
Literary Critic
Satirist
Social Critic
Writer
Baltimore
Maryland
Henry Louis Mencken
Alimony
Ransom
Devil
Pay
Marriage
Happy

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Immorality: the morality of those who are having a better time.
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Who will argue that 98.6 Farenheit is the right temperature for man? As for me, I decline to do it. It may be that we are all actually freezing hence the pervading stupidity of mankind. At 110 or 115 degrees even archbishops might be intelligent.
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Never underestimate the bad taste of the American public
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Every man is his own hell.
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To believe that Russia has got rid of the evils of capitalism takes a special kind of mind. It is the same kind of mind that believes that a Holy Roller has got rid of sin.
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The late William Jennings Bryan, L.L.D., always had one great advantage in controversy he was never burdened with an understanding of his opponent's case.
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The allurement that women hold out to men is precisely the allurement that Cape Hatteras holds out to sailors they are enormously dangerous and hence enormously fascinating.
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...no man of genuinely superior intelligence has ever been an actor. Even supposing a young man of appreciable mental powers to be lured upon the stage, as philosophers are occasionally lured into bordellos, his mind would be inevitably and almost immediately destroyed by the gaudy nonsense issuing from his mouth every night.
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A prohibitionist is the sort of man one couldn't care to drink with, even if he drank.
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Platitude: an idea (a) that is admitted to be true by everyone, and (b) that is not true.
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No matter how much a woman loved a man, it would still give her a glow to see him commit suicide for her.
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The formula of the argument is simple and familiar: to dispose of a problem all that is necessary is to deny that it exists.
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Next to the semi-colon, quotation marks seem to be the chief butts of reformatory ardor.
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As if paralyzed by the national fear of ideas, the democratic distrust of whatever strikes beneath the prevailing platitudes, it evades all resolute and honest dealing with what, after all, must be every healthy literature's elementary materials.
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No married man is genuinely happy if he has to drink worse whisky than he used to drink when he was single.
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Is it hot in the rolling mill? Are the hours long? Is $15 a day not enough? Then escape is easy. Simply throw up your job, spit on your hands, and write another Rosenkavailer.
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A mood of constructive criticism being upon me, I propose forthwith that the method of choosing legislators now prevailing in the United States be abandoned and that the method used in choosing juries be substituted. That is to say, I propose that the men who make our laws be chosen by chance and against will of all the rest of us, as now.
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Who ever heard, indeed, of an autobiography that was not (interesting)? I can recall none in all the literature of the world
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