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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 favoured with the sympathetic tears of other women, and a man whose wife has made off is laughed at by other men.

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
Woman
Standard
Away
Survive
Women
Morality
Made
Standards
Lured
Long
Husband
Favoured
Men
Tears
Sympathetic
World
Whose
Double
Wife
Laughed

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What is too often forgotten is that nature obviously intends the botched to die, and that every interference with that benign process is full of dangers.
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The difference between a moral man and a man of honor is that the latter regrets a discreditable act, even when it has worked and he has not been caught.
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One horse-laugh is worth ten-thousand syllogisms.
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Good government is that which delivers the citizen from being done out of his life and property too arbitrarily and violently-one that relieves him sufficiently from the barbaric business of guarding them to enable him to engage in gentler, more dignified, and more agreeable undertakings.
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The notion that a radical is one who hates his country is naïve and usually idiotic. He is, more likely, one who likes his country more than the rest of us, and is thus more disturbed than the rest of us when he sees it debauched. He is not a bad citizen turning to crime he is a good citizen driven to despair.
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I believe that religion, generally speaking, has been a curse to mankind.
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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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Our literature, despite several false starts that promised much, is chiefly remarkable, now as always, for its respectable mediocrity.
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No one hates his job so heartily as a farmer.
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Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.
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A great literature is thus chiefly the product of doubting and inquiring minds in revolt against the immovable certainties of the nation.
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Every failure teaches a man something, to wit, that he will probably fail again.
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If there were only three women left in the world, two of them would immediately convene a court-martial to try the other one.
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The federal [bank deposit] insurance scheme has worked up to now simply and solely because there have been very few bank failures. The next time we have a pestilence of them it will come to grief quickly enough, and if the good banks escape ruin with the bad ones it will be only because the taxpayer foots the bill.
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A professional politician is a professionally dishonorable man. In order to get anywhere near high office he has to make so many compromises and submit to so many humiliations that he becomes indistinguishable from a streetwalker.
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The most curious social convention of the great age in which we live is the one to the effect that religious opinions should be respected.
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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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