phrase-merchant

Updated: May 10, 2025

We found, not a profound thinker, not a leader of sound opinion, not a man of notable sense, but merely a wholesaler of notions so infantile that they must needs disgust a sentient suckling in brief, a spouting geyser of fallacies and sentimentalities, a cataract of unsupported assumptions and hollow moralizings, a tedious phrase-merchant and platitudinarian, a fellow whose noblest flights of thought were flattered when they were called comprehensible specifically, a Wilson, a Taft, a Roosevelt, or a Harding.

H. L. (Henry Louis) Mencken - In Defense of Women