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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
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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
I believe that any man who takes the liberty of another into his keeping is bound to become a tyrant, and that any man who yields up his liberty, in however slight the measure, is bound to become a slave.
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The difference between the smartest dog and the stupidest man - say a Tennessee Holy Roller - is really very small.
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As if paralyzed by the national fear of ideas, the democratic distrust of whatever strikes beneath the prevailing platitudes, it evades all resolute and honest dealing with what, after all, must be every healthy literature's elementary materials.
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Philosophy first constructs a scheme of happiness and then tries to fit the world to it.
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Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.
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Progress: The process whereby the human race has got rid of whiskers, the vermiform appendix and God.
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A man always blames the woman who fools him. In the same way he blames the door he walks into in the dark.
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Let no one mistake it for comedy, farcical though it may be in all its details. It serves notice on the country that Neanderthal man is organizing in these forlorn backwaters of the land, led by a fanatic, rid of sense and devoid of conscience.
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The common man knows exactly what he wants...and deserves to get it good and hard.
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The chief contribution of Protestantism to human thought is its massive proof that God is a bore.
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Skin diseases are something doctors like, the patient neither dies nor gets well.
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No man ever quite believes in any other man.
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Laws are no longer made by a rational process of public discussion they are made by a process of blackmail and intimidation, and they are executed in the same manner
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Correct spelling, indeed, is one of the arts that are far more esteemed by schoolma’ams than by practical men, neck-deep in the heat and agony of the world.
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Psychotherapy is the theory that the patient will probably get well anyhow and is certainly a damn fool.
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The truth is that Christian theology, like every other theology, is not only opposed to the scientific spirit it is also opposed to all other attempts at rational thinking.
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A government at bottom is nothing more than a group of men, and as a practical matter most of them are inferior men. ... Yet these nonentities, by the intellectual laziness of men in general ... are generally obeyed as a matter of duty (and) assumed to have a kind of wisdom that is superior to ordinary wisdom.
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Never argue with a man whose job depends on not being convinced.
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A poet over 30 is pathetic
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I believe that it should be perfectly lawful to print even things that outrage the pruderies and prejudices of the general, so long as any honest minority, however small, wants to read them. The remedy of the majority is not prohibition, but avoidance.
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