Wit & Attitude Quote by H. L. Mencken

Mencken turns moral contagion into a bodily function, and that’s the joke with teeth: you can’t move through society without absorbing its “moral prejudices” any more than you can visit hell without sweating. The line works because it refuses the polite fiction that ethics are chosen in some pristine, rational marketplace. Instead, morality is treated like humidity: ambient, unavoidable, and mostly noticed only when you’re already uncomfortable.

The phrase “moral prejudices” is Mencken’s dagger. He doesn’t say values, principles, or conscience; he says prejudices, collapsing the high-minded language of virtue into the low, tribal mechanics of taste and reflex. That’s classic Mencken: a demolition of American moral self-congratulation, aimed at the clergy, the reformers, the prohibitionists, and the civic scolds who dressed their social preferences up as universal truth.

The hell image sharpens the cynicism. Hell isn’t just an afterlife punchline; it’s a shorthand for the world’s heat and pressure, the way public life conditions you through reward and punishment. Mencken’s subtext is that purity is a fantasy, and moral independence is mostly a pose. You can try to stay “above” the crowd, but you’re still breathing its air, speaking its language, internalizing its shames.

Written in an era of mass persuasion and moral crusades, the line reads like a warning label for citizenship: participation has side effects, and the most dangerous ones arrive disguised as righteousness.