Life & Wisdom Quote by H. L. Mencken

Mencken turns the cozy moral furniture of public life into a booby trap. His definition of “platitude” is built like a legal brief that suddenly becomes a punchline: first, the credential (“admitted to be true by everyone”), then the verdict (“and… not true”). The parenthetical numbering mimics dictionary authority while quietly mocking it, as if the very apparatus we use to certify meaning is part of the scam. Mencken’s wit isn’t decorative; it’s accusatory.

The intent is to expose consensus as a suspect form of knowledge. If everyone nods along, Mencken implies, that unanimity is less proof than social pressure - a sign the idea has been sanded down until it can’t cut anyone. Platitudes function as civic sedation: they let you feel aligned with “common sense” without the inconvenience of thinking, testing, or risking disagreement. His twist is not that platitudes are boring; it’s that they’re often actively false, kept afloat by repetition and etiquette rather than reality.

The subtext is vintage Mencken cynicism about mass opinion and the pieties of American public speech: sermons, political slogans, self-help optimism, the whole industry of reassuring phrases that confer virtue on the speaker. Context matters: writing in a period when advertising, propaganda, and boosterism were modernizing fast, Mencken treats popular “truths” as manufactured goods. The joke lands because it flatters the reader’s skepticism while warning them how easily skepticism itself can be domesticated into another slogan.