"Say what you will about the ten commandments, you must always come back to the pleasant fact that there are only ten of them"
About this Quote
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?
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?
Quote Details
| Topic | Witty One-Liners |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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