"Adultery is the application of democracy to love"
About this Quote
Mencken’s line lands like a champagne cork popping in a church: loud, funny, and designed to offend the people who most cherish “decency” as social glue. Calling adultery “the application of democracy to love” is a deliberately misfit metaphor. Democracy is supposed to be noble: consent of the governed, equal voice, freedom from tyranny. Mencken drags that civic halo into the bedroom and turns it into a scandalous logic puzzle. If democracy means choice and competition, then why should romance remain a monarchy?
The intent isn’t to defend cheating as ethical; it’s to ridicule the way bourgeois culture treats sexual exclusivity as both moral law and proof of character. Mencken’s subtext is that marriage, as practiced in his era, often looks less like romance and more like property management: contract, status, and public performance. Adultery becomes “democratic” not because it’s fair, but because it refuses the idea that one person should hold a permanent, sovereign claim over another’s desire.
Context matters. Writing in early 20th-century America, Mencken had a front-row seat to Prohibition-era moral crusades, a culture eager to regulate appetites while quietly indulging them. The joke works because it exposes a national contradiction: Americans celebrate freedom in the abstract, then panic when freedom shows up in inconvenient places. Mencken’s cynicism is surgical: he suggests that what society calls “sin” may just be human preference colliding with an institution that demands lifelong unanimity.
The intent isn’t to defend cheating as ethical; it’s to ridicule the way bourgeois culture treats sexual exclusivity as both moral law and proof of character. Mencken’s subtext is that marriage, as practiced in his era, often looks less like romance and more like property management: contract, status, and public performance. Adultery becomes “democratic” not because it’s fair, but because it refuses the idea that one person should hold a permanent, sovereign claim over another’s desire.
Context matters. Writing in early 20th-century America, Mencken had a front-row seat to Prohibition-era moral crusades, a culture eager to regulate appetites while quietly indulging them. The joke works because it exposes a national contradiction: Americans celebrate freedom in the abstract, then panic when freedom shows up in inconvenient places. Mencken’s cynicism is surgical: he suggests that what society calls “sin” may just be human preference colliding with an institution that demands lifelong unanimity.
Quote Details
| Topic | Witty One-Liners |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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