Life & Mortality Quote by H. L. Mencken

Mencken lands the punch with a neat asymmetry: the man’s terror is prospective, the woman’s is retrospective. Death is the deadline men are trained to dread; age is the verdict women are trained to wear. The line works because it’s less a claim about biology than an indictment of two different social scripts, both absurd in their own way. Mencken’s signature move is to say something that sounds like a cruel “truth” about the sexes while actually baiting you into noticing the machinery behind it.

The man “weeps” because he will die “so soon” - a melodramatic complaint that frames life as insufficient runway for ambition, achievement, legacy. It’s ego with a ticking clock. The woman “weeps” because she “was born so long ago” - a brilliantly mean phrasing that makes aging feel like an offense committed at birth. Mencken exposes how femininity, in a culture obsessed with youth as currency, gets timed out not at death but at the first visible sign of history on the body.

The subtext is cynicism about modernity’s sentimental myths: that men are heroic strivers cut down too early, that women are decorative beings whose worth is pegged to freshness. It’s a joke, but it’s also social criticism dressed as a barb. Written in an era when mass advertising and glossy “beauty culture” were accelerating, Mencken turns gender anxiety into a one-line satire of what America was learning to sell: time, fear, and the promise of escape from both.