War & Peace Quote by H. L. Mencken

Mencken doesn’t romanticize love; he militarizes it. The line lands because it steals the language of honor, strategy, and inevitability from war and smuggles it into the supposedly private realm of feeling. “Easy to begin” cuts against the myths we tell ourselves: that love arrives as destiny or moral achievement. Mencken’s implication is nastier and more modern - beginnings are cheap. Chemistry, loneliness, boredom, vanity, a good evening and bad judgment: plenty of sparks can light the fuse. The real cost comes later, when the machinery is already moving.

The second clause is where Mencken’s cynicism bites. “Very hard to stop” isn’t a valentine; it’s an after-action report. Love, like war, creates sunk costs and collateral damage: shared histories, social commitments, pride, the fear of looking foolish, the temptation to “win,” even when winning means staying. The subtext is that people don’t just fall in love; they enlist. Once enlisted, they start justifying losses, escalating commitments, rewriting the story so the suffering feels meaningful. That’s the psychological logic of conflict, applied to romance.

Context matters: Mencken wrote in a period when American public life was drenched in patriotic rhetoric and mass persuasion, and he spent his career puncturing pieties. Pairing love with war is his way of mocking sentimental culture while also acknowledging something bleakly true about human behavior: we mistake momentum for purpose. The wit is surgical - he doesn’t deny love’s power, he indicts its politics.