"Immorality: the morality of those who are having a better time"
About this Quote
Mencken’s line is a cocktail of insult and diagnosis: “immorality” isn’t a stable category so much as a complaint filed by the bored against the unbothered. The definition is built like a prank dictionary entry, but the joke has teeth. By flipping “immorality” into “the morality of those who are having a better time,” he exposes the way moral language often functions as social policing. Pleasure becomes evidence. Enjoyment becomes a provocation. The “better time” is the tell: the target isn’t evil, it’s envy.
The subtext is pure Mencken: American respectability is less a commitment to virtue than a resentment machine. He’s not defending every taboo for its own sake; he’s mocking the reflex that treats other people’s appetites as a public emergency. The quote works because it uses morality’s own pretensions against it. If “immorality” can be reduced to someone else’s fun, then moral condemnation starts to look less like principle and more like status maintenance - protecting hierarchies, enforcing conformity, keeping the party exclusive.
Context sharpens the cynicism. Mencken wrote in an era of Progressive Era crusades and Prohibition, when reformers promised cleaner souls through cleaner laws. He watched “public virtue” become a political aesthetic: campaigns against drink, sex, profanity, and “decadence” that doubled as campaigns for control. His one-liner compresses that whole cultural battle into a single insinuation: if your ethics are mostly about regulating other people’s pleasures, maybe it’s not ethics you’re practicing. It’s grievance.
The subtext is pure Mencken: American respectability is less a commitment to virtue than a resentment machine. He’s not defending every taboo for its own sake; he’s mocking the reflex that treats other people’s appetites as a public emergency. The quote works because it uses morality’s own pretensions against it. If “immorality” can be reduced to someone else’s fun, then moral condemnation starts to look less like principle and more like status maintenance - protecting hierarchies, enforcing conformity, keeping the party exclusive.
Context sharpens the cynicism. Mencken wrote in an era of Progressive Era crusades and Prohibition, when reformers promised cleaner souls through cleaner laws. He watched “public virtue” become a political aesthetic: campaigns against drink, sex, profanity, and “decadence” that doubled as campaigns for control. His one-liner compresses that whole cultural battle into a single insinuation: if your ethics are mostly about regulating other people’s pleasures, maybe it’s not ethics you’re practicing. It’s grievance.
Quote Details
| Topic | Ethics & Morality |
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