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Platitude: an idea (a) that is admitted to be true by everyone, and (b) that is not true.
H. L. Mencken
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H. L. Mencken
Age: 75 †
Born: 1880
Born: September 12
Died: 1956
Died: January 29
Autobiographer
Essayist
Historian
Journalist
Linguist
Literary Critic
Satirist
Social Critic
Writer
Baltimore
Maryland
Henry Louis Mencken
Literature
Idea
Everyone
True
Ideas
Platitude
Platitudes
Admitted
Cynical
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Capitalism undoubtedly has certain boils and blotches upon it, but has it as many as government? Has it as many as marriage? Has it as many as religion? I doubt it. It is the only basic institution of modern man that shows any genuine health and vigor.
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Our literature, despite several false starts that promised much, is chiefly remarkable, now as always, for its respectable mediocrity.
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Adultery is the application of democracy to love.
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When you sympathize with a married woman you either make two enemies or gain one wife and one friend.
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I give you Chicago. It is not London and Harvard. It is not Paris and buttermilk. It is American in every chitling and sparerib. It is alive from snout to tail.
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We are here and it is now. Further than that, all human knowledge is moonshine.
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The intellectual heritage of the race belongs to the minority.
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The average man gets his living by such depressing devices that boredom becomes a sort of natural state to him.
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Theology is the effort to explain the unknowable in terms of the not worth knowing.
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Absence is the dark-room in which lovers develop negatives.
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Our whole practical government is grounded in mob psychology and the Boobus Americanus will follow any command that promises to make him safer.
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Love begins like a triolet and ends like a college yell.
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It is almost as safe to assume that an artist of any dignity is against his country, i.e., against the environment in which God hath placed him, as it is to assume that his country is against the artist.
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A Sunday school is a prison in which children do penance for the evil conscience of their parents.
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If, after I depart this vale, you ever remember me and have thought to please my ghost, forgive some sinner and wink your eye at some homely girl.
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If the average man is made in God's image, then a man such as Beethoven or Aristotle is plainly superior to God, and so God may be jealous of him, and eager to see his superiority perish with his bodily frame.
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School teachers, taking them by and large, are probably the most ignorant and stupid class of men in the whole group of mental workers.
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The saddest life is that of a political aspirant under democracy. His failure is ignominious and his success is disgraceful.
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There is something even more valuable to civilization than wisdom, and that is character.
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Whenever a reporter is assigned to cover a Methodist conference, he comes home an atheist.
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