Quotes About Cliches

Literature is the orchestration of platitudes.

I'm not into cliches like 'no time' for love. If I find the right person, I'll definitely find time.

I would love to be part of dark comedies. I love them! They are no-nonsense, no spoonfeeding, and the norms and cliches are left behind.

The clichés in political denunciations in many low-technology, developing cultures—enemy of the people, capitalist war-mongers —that strike high literates as mindless are residual formulary essentials of oral thought processes.

Indeed, it may be said with some confidence that the average man never really thinks from end to end of his life. There are moments when his cogitations are relatively more respectable than usual, but even at their climaxes they never reach anything properly describable as the level of serious thought. The mental activity of such people is only a mounting of clichés.

The average man never really thinks from end to end of his life. The mental activity of such people is only a mouthing of clichés.

Cliches, stock phrases, adherence to conventional, standardized codes of expression and conduct have the socially recognized function of protecting us against reality.

Clichés, stock phrases, adherence to conventional, standardized codes of expression and conduct have the socially recognized function of protecting us against reality, that is, against the claim on our thinking attention that all events and facts make by virtue of their existence.

Attempting to get at truth means rejecting stereotypes and cliches.

CONVENTIONS, LIKE CLICHÉS, HAVE a way of surviving their own usefulness. They are then excused or defended as the idioms of living. For everyone, foreign by birth or by nature, convention is a mark of fluency. That is why, for any woman, marriage is the idiom of life.

Clichés were only a sin in literature. In life, if they happened to be true, there was no intellectual campaign that would defeat them.

Political art expresses the cliches you agree with, unlike propaganda, which expresses the cliches you don't.

It is a cliche that most cliches are true, but then like most cliches, that cliche is untrue.

It was really unusual that the crews on 'Spooks' were a real mix of men and women, and you'd struggle to see many women with parts that weren't cliched back in the late '90s.

Normally you read a screenplay - and I read a lot of them - and the characters don't feel like people. They feel like plot devices or cliches or stereotypes.

For the great enemy of truth is very often not the lie—deliberate, contrived and dishonest—but the myth—persistent, persuasive, and unrealistic. Too often we hold fast to the clichés of our forebears. We subject all facts to a prefabricated set of interpretations. We enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought."—John F. Kennedy

Politicians in our times feed their clichés to television, where even those who wish to disagree repeat them. Television purports to challenge political language by conveying images, but the succession from one frame to another can hinder a sense of resolution. Everything happens fast, but nothing actually happens. Each story on televised news is "breaking" until it is displaced by the next one. So we are hit by wave upon wave but never see the ocean.

Politicians in our times feed their clichés to television, where even those who wish to disagree repeat them. Television purports to challenge political language by conveying images, but the secession from one frame to another can hinder a sense of resolution. Everything happens fast, but nothing actually happens. Each story on televised news is "breaking" until it is displaced by the next one. So we are hit by wave upon wave but never see the ocean.

Users of clichés frequently have more sinister intentions beyond laziness and conventional thinking. Relabelling events often entails subtle changes of meaning. War produces many euphemisms, downplaying or giving verbal respectability to savagery and slaughter.

Man is a creature who lives not upon bread alone, but primarily by catchwords.

he remembered his uncle saying once how little vocabulary man really needed to get comfortably and even efficiently through his life, how not only in the individual but within his whole type and race and kind a few simple cliches served his few simple passions and needs and lusts.

A writer who can't use his firsthand experience must turn to secondhand experience, which can lead to thirdhand clichés.

I thought that prejudicial adjectives and liberal clichés in the reportorial copy undercut the power of the facts.

The atmosphere in the room was so thick with dramatic clichés you could have cut it with a knife.