Daily Inspiration Quote by Wilson Mizner

Mizner’s gripe isn’t with praise; it’s with the transactional bad writing of praise. “Careless flattery” lands like a half-hearted hustle: compliments so generic, so poorly observed, they force the target into an absurd kind of labor. The sting is in that last clause - “exhausts you in your efforts to believe it” - a neat reversal of etiquette. Flattery is supposed to lighten the room, to make you feel seen. Mizner points out its darker social mechanism: it can become a demand, an obligation to perform gratitude for something you don’t actually recognize as true.

As a dramatist (and famously sharp-tongued Broadway operator), Mizner understands that dialogue is never just dialogue; it’s leverage. Careless flattery is the stage direction of a bad actor: it signals the speaker’s laziness and, worse, their impatience. They want the payoff of intimacy or favor without doing the work of accuracy. The recipient, meanwhile, is put in a no-win scene. Call it out and you look vain or suspicious; accept it and you feel complicit in a small lie.

The line also captures a very modern fatigue: the way constant, low-effort affirmation (in a green room, at a party, online) turns emotion into admin. Mizner’s wit works because it makes a social irritation sound like physical exertion. Bad praise doesn’t inflate the ego; it drains it.