Time & Perspective Quote by H. L. Mencken

Mencken’s insult lands by treating sentimentality not as softness but as strategy. The “bad man” here isn’t a comic-book villain; he’s a type Mencken loved to skewer: the moral opportunist who performs reverence for “good women” as proof of his own decency. The weeping is the tell. Tears, normally a credential of sincerity, become evidence of manipulation or self-pity - an emotional bribe offered to the room. He’s not moved by the woman’s goodness; he’s moved by what her goodness can do for him.

The phrase “good woman” is doing double duty. On the surface it’s praise, the old-fashioned pedestal of purity and sacrifice. Underneath, it’s a prop. Mencken is puncturing the culture that canonizes women as moral alibis: mother, wife, saint, redeemer. The bad man needs that figure because she lets him outsource his conscience. He can remain crooked while staying close to “goodness,” narrating himself as tragically flawed rather than responsible.

Context matters: Mencken wrote in an era thick with public piety, Victorian hangovers, and a booming marketplace for virtue-signaling (churchy rhetoric, temperance moralism, respectable tears). His cynicism is calibrated to that world. The line works because it reverses an expected moral reading - emotion as evidence - and replaces it with a harsher diagnostic: excessive tenderness can be a mask for contempt, entitlement, or guilt that refuses to change.