Wit & Attitude Quote by H. L. Mencken

Mencken’s line is a neat little cruelty disguised as etiquette: treat silence as a protective casing around human mediocrity, then let speech puncture it. The joke runs on a reversal of polite society’s usual presumption (that people are reasonable until proven otherwise). Mencken flips it into a default skepticism, and the snap at the end - “seldom necessary to assume it” - lands like a closing gavel. Assumption becomes confirmation; conversation becomes evidence.

The intent isn’t just to dunk on “a man” as a species of boor. Mencken is diagnosing the public sphere. Speech, in his view, is less a vehicle for truth than a stage for vanity, cant, and the eager recital of inherited opinions. The subtext is anti-romantic: human beings don’t rise to the occasion of articulation; they reveal the cheap scaffolding of their thinking. Silence allows the illusion of depth. Talk exposes the hollow.

Context matters: Mencken wrote in the age of mass newspapers, mass politics, and mass certainty - when slogans and moral crusades traveled faster than reflection. His cynicism is the style and the argument. The sentence is engineered to perform what it claims: it invites the reader to smirk at the speaker and, by extension, at the crowd. You’re meant to feel recruited into a smaller, sharper circle that “knows better,” even as Mencken warns that everyone, including you, is only a few sentences away from self-indictment.