Art & Creativity Quote by H. L. Mencken

Mencken doesn’t merely insult bad writers; he detonates the polite fiction that everyone is a writer-in-waiting. The line is built like a trap: it starts with a familiar grievance (people can’t write), then yanks the reader down a harsher causal chain (because they can’t think), and finally slams the door with “congenitally” - not a failure of schooling or effort, but a defect of wiring. The moon image seals the argument with mock-scientific finality: asking most people to write well is as absurd, he implies, as asking them to achieve literal spaceflight with bare hands.

The intent is cultural triage. Mencken is defending standards - not in the gentle workshop sense, but in the scorched-earth sense of separating the articulate from the mass. He’s also taking a swing at democratic pieties: the era’s expanding literacy, mass journalism, and middlebrow uplift movements promised that taste and intellect could be widely distributed if only institutions tried harder. Mencken’s counterclaim is that institutions can’t manufacture brains.

Subtext: contempt as clarity. He frames thinking as “equipment,” reducing mind to machinery and turning the humanist idea of self-improvement into a hardware problem. That’s Mencken’s cynicism doing work: it flatters the reader who feels exceptional while needling the reader who suspects he’s part of the herd. It’s also a writer’s power play. By making writing the downstream proof of thinking, Mencken elevates his own craft from “expression” to a diagnostic test for intelligence - and, conveniently, positions himself as the examiner.