Life's Pleasures Quote by H. L. Mencken

Mencken’s line is a cocktail of contempt served straight: the prohibitionist isn’t merely wrong, he’s socially unbearable. The wit hinges on a neat double turn. First, it defines the prohibitionist by absence - a person who refuses drink - then it twists the knife by insisting the real offense isn’t abstinence at all. Even if he did drink, you still wouldn’t want him at the table. Mencken reframes temperance as a personality defect: not a moral stance but a failure of conviviality, humor, and proportion.

The subtext is classic Mencken: suspicion of reformers who treat private pleasure as public emergency. Prohibitionists, in his view, don’t just dislike alcohol; they dislike the human mess that comes with it - appetite, loosened tongues, imperfect judgment, the democratic messiness of people having a good time without permission. The joke lands because drinking here is shorthand for fellowship. To “drink with” someone is to grant them membership in a certain social compact: we will be flawed together, and we won’t pretend otherwise.

Context matters. Mencken was writing in an America where the Anti-Saloon League and other moral entrepreneurs had successfully turned a cultural battle into federal law. Prohibition wasn’t only about booze; it was about power, class, and control, with a heavy nativist undertone aimed at immigrant drinking cultures. Mencken’s insult masks a warning: when politics becomes puritan theater, the result is not virtue but bad company running the country.