Whenever a husband and wife begin to discuss their marriage they are giving evidence at a coroner's inquest.
Interpretation
Discussing marriage can often lead to conflict rather than resolution, suggesting it's a delicate topic.
H. L. Mencken's quote humorously compares marital discussions to a coroner's inquest, implying that examining the state of a marriage can often feel like an investigation into a failed relationship. This metaphor suggests that like an inquest, these discussions can uncover problems and dissatisfaction, which can feel somber and potentially detrimental to the bond between partners, rather than fostering understanding and love.
In practice
During a wedding ceremony, one might quote this to highlight the challenges of marriage.
I know a good many men of great learning-that is, men born with an extraordinary eagerness and capacity to acquire knowledge. One and all, they tell me that they can't recall learning anything of any value in school. All that schoolmasters managed to accomplish with them was to test and determine the amount of knowledge that they had already acquired independently-and not infrequently the determination was made clumsily and inaccurately.
It takes a long while for a naturally trustful person to reconcile himself to the idea that after all God will not help him
It is the theory of all modern civilized governments that they protect and foster the liberty of the citizen; it is the practice of all of them to limit its exercise, and sometimes very narrowly.
The central belief of every moron is that he is the victim of a mysterious conspiracy against his common rights and true deserts.
The cure for the evils of democracy is more democracy.
It is my conviction that no normal man ever fell in love, within the ordinary meaning of the term, after the age of thirty.
I take people very seriously. People are all I take seriously, in fact. Therefore, I have nothing but sympathy for how people behave - and nothing but laughter to console them with.
To me, "sexual freedom" means freedom from having to have sex.
The task of organizing human happiness needs the active cooperation of man and woman: it cannot be relegated to one half of the world.
Empathy has the power to bring together people who would otherwise never meet. It has the power to teach us and to reach us in moments of isolation when we think nobody understands.
My feminist training was that this was your goal, to be a self-sufficient woman, but that is a miscalculation. It's just not the way we work. We work in dialogue with the community.
Funny business, a woman's career: the things you drop on the way up the ladder so you can move faster. You forget you'll need them again when you get back to being a woman. It's one career all females have in common, whether we like it or not: being a woman. Sooner or later, we've got to work at it, no matter how many other careers we've had or wanted.
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