Aging & Wisdom Quote by H. L. Mencken

Mencken’s line bites because it flips a medical cliché into a moral diagnosis. “Hard arteries” is the blunt physiology of age: calcification, narrowing, the body turning rigid. But the punch is the second clause, where the expected metaphor (a hardened heart) is inverted. The heart goes “soft” not in the sentimental greeting-card sense, but in the Mencken sense: a weakening, a loss of edge, an accommodation with the very hypocrisies he spent a career skewering.

The intent feels double-edged. On one side, it’s a cynical jab at late-life piety and mellowing: the firebrand who, confronted with mortality, begins to prize comfort over conviction, belonging over truth-telling. Mencken distrusted uplift and moral posturing; “soft” is his warning label for the creeping respectability that comes with age, status, and the desire to be forgiven by the crowd. If the body is getting less flexible, the psyche compensates by getting more pliable.

On the other side, the subtext admits an uncomfortable tenderness: perhaps softness is the body’s bargaining chip, a survival strategy. When time compresses, cruelty looks expensive. Even a professional iconoclast can find himself recalculating what matters, trading pure contempt for something closer to mercy, or at least fatigue.

Context matters: Mencken wrote through an era that rewarded certainty, nationalism, and moral crusades. This aphorism reads like a private aside from someone who watched idealists harden into scolds and scolds soften into elders, all while the machinery of life kept ossifying underneath.