Life & Wisdom Quote by H. L. Mencken

Mencken’s joke lands with the neat cruelty of a filing cabinet slammed shut. The Ten Commandments are supposed to be granite-serious, a divine constitution. He treats them instead like a manageable to-do list, praising not their holiness but their word count. That’s the point: he kneecaps religious moral authority by reducing it to administrative convenience. If you can compliment God’s law the way you’d compliment a menu for being short, you’ve already demoted it from revelation to paperwork.

The line also smuggles in a broader argument about moral systems: people don’t just crave virtue, they crave legibility. “Only ten” is a comforting limit, a promise that morality can be contained, memorized, posted on a wall, and then, conveniently, ignored. Mencken’s wit is that he doesn’t even need to dispute the commandments themselves; he suggests their cultural success rests partly on branding. Ten is a human-scaled number. Ten fits on stone tablets, in sermons, in schoolrooms. Ten is marketable.

Context matters. Mencken wrote as a professional skeptic in a country where public piety was often loud, political, and suspicious of nuance. His target isn’t faith in the private sense; it’s the American appetite for moral certainty packaged as simple rules. The “pleasant fact” is a dagger: he’s mocking how easily people confuse the comfort of simplicity with the rigor of ethics. The laugh arrives, then the aftertaste: if morality needs to be this compact to be tolerated, what does that say about us?