Life without sex might be safer but it would be unbearably dull. It is the sex instinct which makes women seem beautiful, which they are once in a blue moon, and men seem wise and brave, which they never are at all. Throttle it, denaturalize it, take it away, and human existence would be reduced to the prosaic, laborious, boresome, imbecile level of life in an anthill.

In Mencken’s characteristically sardonic voice, the passage argues that sexual desire is a primary engine of human vitality and illusion. The “sex instinct” is portrayed as a kind of enchantment that beautifies women and ennobles men in the lover’s imagination, producing ideals—beauty, wisdom, bravery—that Mencken treats as rare or even fictive. Yet he insists these fictions are socially and psychologically productive: without erotic appetite, life would become safe but flattened, reduced to mechanical labor and collective routine, like an anthill. The quote thus blends biological reductionism with cultural critique, suggesting that much of what humans call romance, heroism, and aspiration is fueled by desire rather than reason.