Life & Wisdom Quote by H. L. Mencken

Mencken doesn’t flatter “honor” so much as pickpocket it. By calling honor “simply the morality of superior men,” he drains the word of its civic perfume and re-labels it as a class dialect: a code that sounds universal only because the people who benefit from it have the loudest megaphones. The sting is in “simply.” It’s a reduction, a shrug, the rhetorical equivalent of pushing a ceremonial sword aside to reveal the receipt.

The intent is classic Mencken: puncture moral grandstanding by exposing its sociology. “Honor” is supposed to be lofty, selfless, even sacrificial. Mencken implies it’s often the opposite - a set of rules designed by elites to dignify their own instincts (pride, dominance, reputational anxiety) and then market them as virtue. That’s why the phrase “superior men” matters. Mencken is baiting the reader: is “superior” an actual moral category, or just a title conferred by money, education, race, gender, or institutional power? His subtext is that moral vocabularies are rarely neutral; they’re tools in a status struggle.

Context sharpens the cynicism. Writing in an America obsessed with respectability, patriotism, and “character,” Mencken watched public morality get weaponized - against immigrants, dissenters, and anyone who didn’t speak the right pieties. “Honor” in that environment wasn’t just personal integrity; it was a social passport. Mencken’s line works because it’s both epigram and accusation: what you call honor may be nothing more than the ruling class’s self-portrait, framed as ethics.