"Self-respect: the secure feeling that no one, as yet, is suspicious"
About this Quote
Mencken turns a virtue into a police report. “Self-respect” is supposed to sound internal, earned, upright; he flips it into a merely temporary condition: the comfort of not yet being found out. The joke lands because it treats morality as performance and society as surveillance. In Mencken’s world, the respectable citizen isn’t necessarily good; he’s simply managed his optics well enough to avoid inquiry.
The key barb is “as yet.” It makes self-respect a countdown timer. Integrity isn’t stable character but a reprieve, dependent on other people’s ignorance. Mencken’s cynicism isn’t blanket misanthropy so much as a diagnostic: social life rewards plausibility. If people are watching, you curate. If they’re not, you relax into whatever you actually are. “Suspicious” sharpens the critique by borrowing the language of law enforcement, implying that community judgment works like an investigation: the decent are those without an active case file.
Context matters: Mencken wrote in an America busy sanctifying itself - boosterism, Prohibition-era moral policing, civic pieties - while quietly enjoying corruption, hypocrisy, and various forms of respectable cruelty. He distrusted institutions that claimed virtue and citizens who used morality as a status badge. This line punctures the bourgeois idea that dignity springs from conscience; it suggests it’s propped up by anonymity and selective attention. The intent isn’t to abolish ethics, but to mock the self-seriousness of “good people” who confuse a clean public record with a clean soul.
The key barb is “as yet.” It makes self-respect a countdown timer. Integrity isn’t stable character but a reprieve, dependent on other people’s ignorance. Mencken’s cynicism isn’t blanket misanthropy so much as a diagnostic: social life rewards plausibility. If people are watching, you curate. If they’re not, you relax into whatever you actually are. “Suspicious” sharpens the critique by borrowing the language of law enforcement, implying that community judgment works like an investigation: the decent are those without an active case file.
Context matters: Mencken wrote in an America busy sanctifying itself - boosterism, Prohibition-era moral policing, civic pieties - while quietly enjoying corruption, hypocrisy, and various forms of respectable cruelty. He distrusted institutions that claimed virtue and citizens who used morality as a status badge. This line punctures the bourgeois idea that dignity springs from conscience; it suggests it’s propped up by anonymity and selective attention. The intent isn’t to abolish ethics, but to mock the self-seriousness of “good people” who confuse a clean public record with a clean soul.
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| Topic | Witty One-Liners |
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