H. L. Mencken Quotes

Always admired men who had many women. It must be that to a child of a dissatisfied woman the idea of monogamy is hollow.

You must be aware that most men (and also not only a few women) are by nature not monogamous. This nature makes itself even more forceful when tradition and circumstance stand in an individual's way.

You can love two or more women at once... but you cannot be loyal to more than one.

It is ridiculous to think that you can spend your entire life with just one person. Three is about the right number. Yes, I imagine three husbands would do it?

Tis the established custom [in Vienna] for every lady to have two husbands, one that bears the name, and another that performs the duties.

Why are women always the ones who have to forgive? If you cheated on a man, he would be like, 'You're disgusting, and I want nothing to do with you.' But women, we're supposed to be like, 'He messed up. He made a mistake.'

It is not monogamy when there is one legal wife, and mistresses out of sight.

I believe in large families: every woman should have at least three husbands.

Men want to think women don't cheat, and women want men to think they don't cheat, and therefore the sexes have been playing a little psychological game with each other.

This is what sexual liberation chiefly accomplishes - it liberates young women to pursue married men.

Eaton has just married his mistress—and the mistress of eleven dozen others!

As to polygamy, I charge it to be … evil—a scarlet whore!

Thro’ want of Ministers to marry and thro’ the licentiousness of the People, many hundreds live in Concubinage – swopping their Wives as Cattel, and living in a State of Nature, more irregularly and unchastely than the Indians.

Women cannot complain about men until they start gettting better taste in them.

Those who imagine polygamy to be handy cover for promiscuity are apparently off the mark. If polygamists share one quality, it is that, polygamy aside, they are extraordinarily strait-laced.

If I were obliged to marry all those with whom I have jested, I should have at least two hundred wives.

Women are interested in relationships and how other societies manage those relationships. They may have been constrained in what roles were open to them, but they could question and observe, and they could write it down.

I know it sounds like I'm playing all these wives and girlfriends, but they're not waiting at home. I wear the pants.

I'm going to get controversial here and say that monogamy isn't natural, especially not for men. It's a concept society birthed a few hundred years ago, even though men's DNA is busy telling them to spread the seed.

Your Western ideas about love are ridiculous. A woman is put on earth to please a man and a man should have many women, and a woman should only have one man.

I'm monogamous from time to time, but I prefer polygamy and polyandry.

...And so we go and I meet his parents. And it's a very strange thing meeting your girlfriend's boyfriend's parents for the first time. Part of you is angry for obvious reasons and part of you still wants to make a good impression. On a side note, they seemed in perfect health.

Why would I make one woman so miserable when I can make so many women very happy?

One wife is too much for most husbands to bear, But two at a time there's no mortal can bear.

What if two people want to be your partner, then what?