War & Peace Quote by H. L. Mencken

Mencken doesn’t offer a proverb here so much as a smirk sharpened into a sentence. “Temptation” is the bait: a morally loaded word that pretends to describe a neutral force, then instantly gets drafted into a gendered blame economy. By calling it a woman’s “weapon,” he borrows the language of combat to frame female desire (or simply female presence) as strategic and predatory. By pairing that with “man’s excuse,” he punctures the other half of the script: male misbehavior as something passively “caused” by women, rather than chosen by men. The line works because it condemns both stories at once, and it does so in Mencken’s favored mode: cynicism that doubles as social x-ray.

The subtext is less about women than about the cultural need to launder responsibility. Mencken is mocking the Victorian-into-early-modern moral theater where men insisted on being both sovereign and helpless: masters of the world, victims of a skirt. “Weapon” implies intent; “excuse” implies evasion. Together they map an ugly symmetry: women are cast as manipulators because men want a narrative that keeps their agency intact everywhere except where it would require restraint.

Context matters. Mencken wrote in an era of rapid shifts in gender norms: suffrage, loosening social codes, the modern city’s mingling of classes and sexes. His epigram condenses that anxiety into a neat transaction of accusation and absolution, then laughs at the transaction itself. It’s not a fair portrait of women; it’s a sharp portrait of the stories men tell to make their appetites sound like fate.