H. L. Mencken - In Defense of Women (1918)

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If the average man is made in God's image, then such a man as Beethoven or Aristotle is plainly superior to God.

H. L. Mencken
Women decide the larger questions of life correctly and quickly, not because they are lucky guessers, not because they are divinely inspired, not because they practise a magic inherited from savagery, but simply and solely because they have sense. They see at a glance what most men could not see with searchlights and telescopes.... They are the supreme realists of the race.

H. L. Mencken
The average male gets his living by such depressing devices that boredom becomes a sort of natural state to him.

H. L. Mencken
Man is always looking for someone to boast to; woman is always looking for a shoulder to put her head on.

H. L. Mencken
The curse of man, and the cause of nearly all his woe, is his stupendous capacity for believing the incredible.

H. L. Mencken
Complete masculinity and stupidity are often indistinguishable.

H. L. Mencken
Civilization, in fact, grows more and more maudlin and hysterical; especially under democracy it tends to degenerate into a mere combat of crazes; the whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary.

H. L. Mencken
Democracy is grounded upon so childish a complex of fallacies that they must be protected by a rigid system of taboos, else even halfwits would argue it to pieces. Its first concern must be to penalize the free play of ideas.

H. L. Mencken
That it should still be necessary, at this late stage in the senility of the human race to argue that women have a fine and fluent intelligence is surely an eloquent proof of the defective observation, incurable prejudice, and general imbecility of their lords and masters.

H. L. Mencken