There is always an easy solution to every human problem—neat, plausible, and wrong.

Mencken coined this line in the early 1920s, a period when he was a prominent journalist and cultural critic skewering American politics, moral crusades, and what he saw as the public’s appetite for simplistic remedies. The remark appears in a newspaper column later collected in his book Prejudices: Second Series (1920). Mencken’s target is the recurring political habit of offering tidy, crowd-pleasing “fixes” for complex social issues—solutions that sound sensible in slogans but collapse under real-world complexity. The aphorism reflects his broader skepticism about mass opinion and reform movements that substitute certainty and rhetoric for careful analysis.

The sentence warns that human problems—social, political, moral—are typically complex, with tangled causes and trade-offs. Because complexity is uncomfortable, people gravitate toward answers that are “neat” (simple), “plausible” (emotionally or rhetorically convincing), and therefore widely marketable. Mencken’s sting is that these attractive answers are often “wrong”: they ignore evidence, oversimplify causation, or create worse consequences. The quote endures as a critique of demagoguery and intellectual laziness, urging skepticism toward one-size-fits-all policies and any proposal that seems too cleanly packaged to be true.

There is always a well-known solution to every human problem—neat, plausible, and wrong.