Life & Wisdom Quote by H. L. Mencken

Mencken doesn’t merely dislike sports; he stages his dislike as a moral allergy, then twists the knife by insulting the devotee, too. The line is built like a dare: he matches “rabidly” with “rabidly,” turning hatred into a mirrored sickness. It’s not enough that sports are beneath him; the fan’s enthusiasm is presented as a kind of cognitive vandalism, something that naturally “hates common sense.” That reversal is the joke and the accusation: in Mencken’s universe, the sports-lover isn’t harmlessly entertained but actively at war with reason.

The subtext is pure Mencken: mass culture as anesthetic, crowds as credulous, and popular passions as indistinguishable from superstition. By yoking “sports” to “common sense,” he smuggles in his larger theme that Americans don’t just seek diversion; they seek permission to stop thinking. The barb works because it flatters the reader who wants to believe they’re immune to the stadium’s spell, while also forcing anyone who isn’t to feel the sting of being lumped in with the irrational herd.

Context matters. Mencken wrote in an America where spectator sports were becoming big business and civic religion, bound up with masculinity, nationalism, and the new machinery of mass media. His contempt isn’t just personal taste; it’s cultural criticism disguised as a wisecrack. He’s mocking the idea that organized, commercialized play should command adult reverence - and suggesting that the reverence itself is the real scandal.