Life & Wisdom Quote by H. L. Mencken

Mencken’s joke lands because it flatters you for a split second, then yanks the compliment away. “Original thought” is supposed to be the civic ideal, the shiny poster in the classroom. He treats it like a design flaw. The word “unendurable” is doing the real work: not merely difficult, not merely messy, but psychologically intolerable. Mencken isn’t arguing against thinking; he’s mocking the sanctimony of people who praise independence of mind while relying on the comforts of herd behavior to keep daily life functioning.

The subtext is a bleak little sociology lesson. If everyone were genuinely original, you wouldn’t get a nation of eloquent dissidents; you’d get a permanent traffic jam of clashing convictions, each person too inventor-like to cooperate and too self-assured to yield. Most social peace depends on imitation, habit, and the quiet agreement to let certain questions stay unasked. Mencken frames that compromise as both ridiculous and necessary, a classic Mencken move: puncture democratic pieties without pretending elites are angels.

Context matters. Writing in an era of mass politics, mass advertising, and boosterish American moralism, Mencken made a career out of diagnosing the public’s appetite for comforting nonsense. Here he’s also needling intellectual vanity. The reader who nods along is implicitly admitting: yes, I want originality in principle, but I’d hate to live among it in practice. That recoil is the punchline - and the indictment.