"I never lecture, not because I am shy or a bad speaker, but simply because I detest the sort of people who go to lectures and don't want to meet them"
About this Quote
Mencken’s line is a grenade tossed into the polite salon of “serious discourse,” and the fuse is his favorite ingredient: contempt sharpened into comedy. He doesn’t just reject lecturing; he rejects the social ecosystem that makes lecturing feel like virtue. The jab isn’t aimed at public speaking as a craft, but at the audience as a type: the self-anointed connoisseurs of ideas who treat intellect as a ticketed event rather than a lived risk.
The sentence is built like a mock-defense. He starts by anticipating the charitable explanations (“shy,” “bad speaker”), then swats them away to reveal the real motive: disgust. That structure matters. It performs what it claims. Mencken refuses the lecture not out of incapacity but out of principle, and the principle is antisocial in the most deliberately social way. He’s baiting the very people who would be offended - and who, by being offended, prove his point.
Underneath is a critique of respectability culture: the lecture hall as a place where people go to be seen consuming culture, not to have their assumptions punctured. Mencken, a journalist who made a career out of puncturing civic pieties, understood that audiences can domesticate ideas by applauding them. Better to write, where the reader can’t cozy up afterward and convert disagreement into networking.
Contextually it fits Mencken’s broader anti-bourgeois stance in early 20th-century America, when public lectures were both entertainment and moral credential. He’s not afraid of the crowd; he’s allergic to the kind of crowd that congratulates itself for showing up.
The sentence is built like a mock-defense. He starts by anticipating the charitable explanations (“shy,” “bad speaker”), then swats them away to reveal the real motive: disgust. That structure matters. It performs what it claims. Mencken refuses the lecture not out of incapacity but out of principle, and the principle is antisocial in the most deliberately social way. He’s baiting the very people who would be offended - and who, by being offended, prove his point.
Underneath is a critique of respectability culture: the lecture hall as a place where people go to be seen consuming culture, not to have their assumptions punctured. Mencken, a journalist who made a career out of puncturing civic pieties, understood that audiences can domesticate ideas by applauding them. Better to write, where the reader can’t cozy up afterward and convert disagreement into networking.
Contextually it fits Mencken’s broader anti-bourgeois stance in early 20th-century America, when public lectures were both entertainment and moral credential. He’s not afraid of the crowd; he’s allergic to the kind of crowd that congratulates itself for showing up.
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| Topic | Witty One-Liners |
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