H. L. Mencken Love Quotations

Love is the triumph of imagination over intelligence.

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.

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

Love is an emotion that is based on an opinion of women that is impossible for those who have had any experience with them.

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

Love is the delusion that one woman differs from another.

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

As the arteries grow hard, the heart grows soft.

Whenever you hear a man speak of his love for his country, it is a sign that he expects to be paid for it.

Adultery is the application of democracy to love.

A man always remembers his first love with special tenderness, but after that he begins to bunch them.

To be in love is merely to be in a perpetual state of anesthesia - to mistake an ordinary young man for a Greek god or an ordinary young woman for a goddess

A man loses his sense of direction after four drinks; a woman loses hers after four kisses.

Happiness is the china shop; love is the bull.

No normal man ever fell in love after thirty when the kidneys begin to disintegrate.

No matter how much a woman loved a man, it would still give her a glow to see him commit suicide for her.

The typical American of today has lost all the love of liberty, that his forefathers had, and all their disgust of emotion, and pride in self- reliance. He is led no longer by Davy Crocketts; he is led by cheer leaders, press agents, word mongers, uplifters.

The fact is that liberty, in any true sense, is a concept that lies quite beyond the reach of the inferior man's mind. And no wonder, for genuine liberty demands of its votaries a quality he lacks completely, and that is courage. The man who loves it must be willing to fight for it; blood, said Jefferson, is its natural manure. Liberty means self-reliance, it means resolution, it means the capacity for doing without . . . the average man doesn't want to be free. He wants to be safe.

Love begins like a triolet and ends like a college yell.

In every woman's life there is one real and consuming love. But very few women guess which one it is.

The fact is that the average man's love of liberty is nine-tenths imaginary, exactly like his love of sense, justice and truth. Liberty is not a thing for the great masses of men. It is the exclusive possession of a small and disreputable minority, like knowledge, courage and honor. It takes a special sort of man to understand and enjoy liberty - and he is usually an outlaw in democratic societies.