Life & Wisdom Quote by H. L. Mencken

Mencken’s genius here is the polite-sounding self-portrait that detonates into a civic insult. He begins with mock correction - “inaccurate” - as if he’s responding to a charge of blanket misanthropy. Then he pivots into a list of “common” virtues: sense, honesty, decency. The repetition is doing double duty. On the surface, it’s a homespun American moral inventory. Underneath, it’s Mencken’s signature sneer: if these things are truly common, why do they read like disqualifying eccentricities?

The punchline lands because it reverses the civic myth that virtue naturally rises to the top. “Forever ineligible for public office” isn’t just self-deprecation; it’s an accusation that the system selects against baseline integrity. Mencken doesn’t have to name corruption, demagoguery, party machines, or voter appetites. He implies them by treating decency as incompatible with the job description.

Context matters: Mencken wrote through the height of American boosterism, mass politics, and the machinery of modern campaigning, and he spent a career puncturing the idea that public life is guided by rational, well-meaning actors. His cynicism isn’t abstract; it’s a satirical diagnosis of incentives. If politics rewards performance over principle, then “common sense” becomes a liability, “common honesty” a strategic error, and “common decency” an obstacle to the necessary cruelties of power.

The joke stings because it flatters the reader’s standards while quietly asking whether the public prefers leaders who don’t meet them.