Happiness Quote by H. L. Mencken

Mencken doesn’t describe alimony; he weaponizes it. Calling it “the ransom that the happy pay to the devil” is a compact piece of his signature cynicism: marriage is not a sentimental institution but a bargain, and the bill arrives precisely when someone thinks they’ve escaped. “Ransom” flips the moral framing. Alimony isn’t support, fairness, or obligation; it’s extortion paid for freedom. That phrasing also mocks the idea that divorce is liberation without consequences. You can leave, Mencken implies, but you don’t get to leave clean.

The line works because it casts happiness as suspicious. In Mencken’s world, contentment is always provisional, always purchased, and always punished. The “devil” isn’t necessarily an ex-spouse; it’s the whole machinery of social expectation, courts, and moral posturing that turns private relationships into public accounting. He’s baiting respectable readers into discomfort: if you think marriage is sacred, why does it require cash settlements to end? If you think divorce is immoral, why does the system price it like a transaction?

Context matters: Mencken wrote in an America where divorce was becoming more visible, women’s financial dependence was often structured by law and custom, and “alimony” was a cultural flashpoint for anxieties about gender, autonomy, and modernity. His joke rides those tensions, then refuses to resolve them. Like much of Mencken, it’s funny in the way a courthouse is funny: the punchline lands, and you realize you’re part of the case.