Quotes About Platitude

The echo of a platitude.

Chant back to us our platitudes about democracy, greatness, and freedom. Vote in our rigged corporate elections. Send your young men and women to fight and die in useless, unwinnable wars that provide huge profits for corporations.

Who makes up or invents proverbs? They are so often a crockful of never-mind-what. They pile up platitude upon platitude which the officious and unctuous mouth in and out of season and are taken to be the distillates of wisdom.

The banality of cancer seems to irk him almost as much as its lethality. Lacking any dialectical substance, it affords few opportunities to escape platitude or avoid cliché. It's a big subject, but it's essentially small talk

A cliché is just something that's commonly true.

Genius might well be defined as the ability to makes a platitude sound as though it were an original remark.

To avoid becoming chronically unemployed, people need more than platitudes offering sympathy. Career reinvention requires encouragement and guidance.

Years later, she poked through the Bible—because okay let's be honest that was her Swedish Death Metal phase and suddenly a bloody guy on a cross held a certain romantic sway—and all she found was a few nice platitudes swaddled in a whole lot of hypocrisy, violence, and misogyny. No way was she going to church.

I know I am talking nonsense, but I'd rather go rambling on, and partly expressing something I find it difficult to express, than to keep on transmitting faultless platitudes.

DULLARD, n. A member of the reigning dynasty in letters and life... The secret of their power is their insensibility to blows; tickle them with a bludgeon and they laugh with a platitude... According to the most trustworthy statistics the number of adult Dullards in the United States is but little short of thirty millions, including the statisticians.

A cliche is everything you've ever heard of.

To Buckley, she embodied the worst of what in subsequent decades would be called political correctness: the mindless application to every issue of a platitudinous egalitarianism whose practical effect invariably is to expand the reach of totalitarianism.

Poetry is] a kind of childlike faith in the efficacy of words, you see, a kind of belief that circumstance somehow will invest the veriest platitude with magic.

You may be decay and a platitude Of flesh, but I have no other such memory of life.

The art of newspaper paragraphing is to stroke a platitude until it purrs like an epigram.

He knew far too many like Fredericks who, while mouthing platitudes, actually held everyone in secret disdain, because they as "leaders" knew what was best "for the people.

Not all who listen, believe. If you call the Gospel a crazy fairy tale, a far-too-good-to-be-true myth, an insane extension of wishful thinking, or even a blasphemous lie, I will respect you and argue with you. But if you call it a platitude, I can only pity you, for that means you have never listened to it.

Most of our platitudes notwithstanding, self-deception remains the most difficult deception.

One likes to think there's something in it, that old platitude amor vincit omnia. But if I've learned one thing in my short sad life, it is that that particular platitude is a lie. Love doesn't conquer everything. And whoever thinks it does is a fool.

But if I've learned one thing in my short sad life, it is that that particular platitude is a lie. Love doesn't conquer everything. And whoever thinks it does is a fool.

Nothing is more tedious than the dreaming platitude.

Questions stripped away the platitudes and undermined the verities that provided a sheltered, nursery existence for people who did not want to think. Questions were the obligation of the intellect.