The thought is genuinely his: in Prejudices: Second Series (1920), in the essay “The Divine Afflatus,” Mencken wrote that “there is always a well-known solution to every human problem—neat, plausible, and wrong.” The familiar “complex problem…clear, simple, and wrong” sentence is a later paraphrase — it appears in no Mencken text, and in none of the printed variants Quote Investigator documents ↗.
“For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong” H. L. Mencken actually wrote: "there is always a well-known solution to every human problem—neat, plausible, and wrong." — "The Divine Afflatus," Prejudices: Second Series (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1920). The popular line "For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong" is a later paraphrase, found in none of his texts. Via Quotle.info · Verbatim: “Explanations exist; they have existed for all time; there is always a well-known solution to every human problem—neat, plausible, and wrong.”
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Provenance
What Mencken actually wrote
Work
Prejudices: Second Series
Essay
IV. “The Divine Afflatus” (chapter begins at p. 155)
First published
1920 · Alfred A. Knopf, New York
Text verified in
Jonathan Cape, London, 1921 printing, p. 158 (Project Gutenberg)
Explanations exist; they have existed for all time; there is always a well-known solution to every human problem—neat, plausible, and wrong. The ancients, in the case at bar, laid the blame upon the gods: sometimes they were remote and surly, and sometimes they were kind.
Prejudices: Second Series, 1920 · Chapter IV
The quotable part is the second half of the first sentence. Every familiar modern version rewrites it — “well-known” becomes “clear” or “easy,” “human problem” becomes “complex problem,” “solution” becomes “answer.” Only “wrong” survives intact.
The earlier essay — Mencken had run a version of “The Divine Afflatus” in the New York Evening Mail on 16 November 1917, the citation most quote sites give. QI reports Fred R. Shapiro’s finding that the sentence was not in that earlier version ↗.
1949 onward — the line starts mutating in newspapers and speeches: “easy solution,” then “simple, quick,” then “complex problem…neat, simple and wrong.” Quote Investigator transcribes the whole drift ↗.
Today — Wikiquote sources the real sentence to “The Divine Afflatus” and flags the version on this page as one of two common paraphrases ↗.
✓Public domain
The work quoted here, Prejudices: Second Series, was first published in 1920 by Alfred A. Knopf in New York — well before the 1931 US copyright cutoff — so Mencken’s text is in the public domain, which is why Project Gutenberg hosts it in full ↗. The reworded version in circulation has no identified author or first printing, so no separate rights claim attaches to it.
Rights status is our research, not legal advice — and copyright varies by country and edition. For commercial or published use, confirm with the rightsholder. See terms.
Fact-check
Right man, wrong sentence
This is not a fake quote in the usual sense — Mencken really did write something very close to it. But three separate things get repeated wrongly: the wording, occasionally the author, and almost always the source.
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The wording“an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong” paraphrase
Mencken wrote “there is always a well-known solution to every human problem—neat, plausible, and wrong.” Wikiquote lists this page’s wording among the sentence’s widely repeated paraphrases ↗, and it does not appear among the dated printed versions Quote Investigator collected ↗.
The source“New York Evening Mail, 16 November 1917” wrong source
Countless pages — including WIST ↗ and Wikiquote — cite the 1917 newspaper version of the essay. Mencken did publish an earlier “Divine Afflatus” there, but QI cites Fred R. Shapiro of The Yale Book of Quotations that the sentence was absent from that initial version ↗; QI credits the 1920 book.
Mencken was not writing about politics or policy when he wrote the line everyone now quotes at politicians. “The Divine Afflatus” is an essay about artistic inspiration — why a writer can be brilliant on Tuesday and idiotic on Wednesday. Having posed the question, Mencken waves away every tidy answer history has offered for it: the gods, the saints, the devil, pure chance, a happy marriage, Freudian complexes.
The famous sentence is the hinge of that dismissal — a warning shot fired just before he offers his own explanation, which is that inspiration is a function of metabolism and is governed, as he puts it, by conditions “particularly south of the pylorus.” The joke is that his own neat, plausible theory is standing in the blast radius of his own aphorism. Strip that setting away and you get the version people quote: a management-seminar maxim with the self-mockery removed.
“neat, plausible, and wrong”
How “neat, plausible” became “clear, simple”
Quote Investigator’s chronology shows the sentence loosening steadily once it left the book. In November 1949 Walter Winchell printed it as “There is always an easy solution to every human problem—neat plausible and wrong.” By 1972 Paul N. Ylvisaker was giving Saturday Review readers “There is a solution to every problem: simple, quick, and wrong.” All of these are transcribed by QI ↗.
The “complex problem” framing — the shape the modern quote takes — shows up in QI’s record in 1976, when Avi Nelson wrote in the Boston Herald that “H. L. Mencken wrote that for every complex human problem, there is a solution that is neat, simple and wrong,” and again in 1983 in Reason as “for every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, obvious, and wrong.” The exact wording on this page is a further step down that road; QI’s survey does not record it at all ↗, and no dated first appearance for it has been established.
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Filed under
More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.
1880–1956 · Baltimore journalist, essayist & cultural critic
Henry Louis Mencken (born in Baltimore on 12 September 1880, died there on 29 January 1956) was a newspaperman, essayist and cultural critic who spent most of his working life at The Baltimore Sun and its sister papers. His Prejudices series — six volumes published between 1919 and 1927 — collected the short, corrosive essays that made him the most quoted American satirist of his generation, and he also produced the scholarly The American Language. That reputation for compressed, quotable contempt is exactly why lines he never wrote keep arriving under his name.
For writers & researchers
Cite this
Primary source
H. L. Mencken, “The Divine Afflatus,” in Prejudices: Second Series (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1920), chap. 4. Verified in the Project Gutenberg text of the Jonathan Cape (London, 1921) printing, p. 158. The popular “complex problem…clear, simple, and wrong” wording is a later paraphrase; see Quote Investigator, “Quote Origin: There Is Always a Well-Known Solution to Every Human Problem—Neat, Plausible, and Wrong” (17 July 2016).
This verification page
Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong’?” Last verified 10 Aug 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/for-every-complex-problem-there-is-an-answer-that-is-clear/