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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
More quotes by H. L. Mencken
The physical business of writing is unpleasant to me, but the psychic satisfaction of discharging bad ideas in worse English makes me forget it.
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Hanging one scoundrel, it appears, does not deter the next. Well, what of it? The first one is at least disposed of.
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The one permanent emotion of the inferior man is fear - fear of the unknown, the complex, the inexplicable. What he wants above everything else is safety.
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The human race is divided into two sharply differentiated and mutually antagonistic classes: a smal l minority that plays with ideas and is capable of taking them in, and a vast majority that finds them painful, and is thus arrayed against them, and against all who have traffic with them.
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A great literature is thus chiefly the product of doubting and inquiring minds in revolt against the immovable certainties of the nation.
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To be in love is merely to be in a state of perceptual anesthesia - to mistake an ordinary young woman for a goddess.
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[T]he only thing wrong with Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address was that it was the South, not the North, that was fighting for a government of the people, by the people and for the people.
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Men always try to make virtues of their weaknesses. Fear of death and fear of life both become piety.
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Theology is the effort to explain the unknowable in terms of the not worth knowing.
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The two main ideas that run through all of my writing, whether it be literary criticism or political polemic are these: I am strong in favor of liberty and I hate fraud.
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Christian endeavor is notoriously hard on female pulchritude.
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Without a doubt there are women who would vote intelligently. There are also men who knit socks beautifully.
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No man is worthy of unlimited reliance-his treason, at best, only waits for sufficient temptation.
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The central belief of every moron is that he is the victim of a mysterious conspiracy against his common rights and true deserts.
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The only way that a government can provide for jobs for all citizens is by deciding what every man should do.
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Once a woman passes a certain point in intelligence she finds it almost impossible to get a husband: she simply cannot go on listening without snickering.
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The storm center of lawlessness in every American State is the State Capitol. It is there that the worst crimes are committed it is there that lawbreaking attains to the estate and dignity of a learned profession it is there that contempt for the laws is engendered, fostered, and spread broadcast.
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Alimony - the ransom that the happy pay to the devil.
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To the man with an ear for verbal delicacies- the man who searches painfully for the perfect word, and puts the way of saying a thing above the thing said - there is in writing the constant joy of sudden discovery, of happy accident.
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Philosophy first constructs a scheme of happiness and then tries to fit the world to it.
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