Top 32 Platitude Quotes
#1. Exceptionalism" - the view that the United States has a right to impose its will because it knows more, sees farther, and lives on a higher moral plane than other nations - was to them not a platitude, but the organizing principle of daily life and global politics.
Stephen Kinzer
#2. The purpose of life is to help others, and if you can't help them, won't you at least not hurt them? I know that is a platitude, that that is sentimental and can easily be attacked. But loving, caring is simple, and we make it complex. Our own neuroses make it complex.
Leo Buscaglia
#3. You mere device," he gnarled. "You platitude! Your Gollux ex machina!
James Thurber
#4. Platitude or not, the crowd erupted into applause, and by acclamation, Kuni Garu became the Duke of Zudi. A few pointed out that titles of nobility really couldn't be handed out in such a democratic fashion, but these killjoys were ignored.
Ken Liu
#5. The idea of Macbeth as a conscience-torm ented man is a platitude as false as Macbeth himself. Macbeth has no conscience. His main concern throughout the play is that most selfish of all concerns: to get a good night's sleep.
Mary McCarthy
#6. Nothing is more tedious than the dreaming platitude.
Karl Marx
#8. 'Better to have loved and lost,' my ass.
Anyone parroting that little platitude had obviously never lost anyone of consequence.
Nenia Campbell
#9. Platitude: an idea (a) that is admitted to be true by everyone, and (b) that is not true.
H.L. Mencken
#10. A platitude is simply a truth repeated till people get tired of hearing it.
Stanley Baldwin
#11. Where in this small-talking world can I find A longitude with no platitude?
Christopher Fry
#12. Though the platitude - money can't buy happiness - may be comforting to those who are less than well heeled, great wealth doesn't ensure sadness either.
Bill Dedman
#13. If some dude I'd never heard of managed to broadcast a platitude like that to the whole globe, I'd probably just feel like I was being spammed.
Damian Kulash
#14. Money can't buy everything." "Someone must have told you that. You'd never think of such a platitude all by yourself. What can't it buy?" "Oh, well, I don't know - not happiness or love, anyway." "Generally it can. And when it can't, it can buy some of the most remarkable substitutes.
Margaret Mitchell
#15. Cue actor platitude, but I've been very fortunate and worked pretty consistently and have felt rather annoyingly grateful that I got to do what I got to do.
Jack Davenport
#16. Truth is rhythmical: if it implies stasis, it is platitude. Truth is syncopated: if it supplies all the terms, there is one term too many. Truth is barbed: if it comforts, it lies. Truth is an armed dancer.
Robert Grudin
#17. Ignorance is not bliss. That platitude is totally wrong. You will not be intellectually happier if you know fewer things. Learning should be a primary goal of living. But what if ignorance feels better - not psychologically, but physically? That would explain a lot of human incongruities.
Chuck Klosterman
#18. Coarseness occurs in a land where platitude inflames this sense of entitlement to more of almost everything, but less of manners and taste, with their irritating intimations of authority and hierarchy.
George F. Will
#20. Commodified fantasy takes no risks: it invents nothing, but imitates and trivializes. It proceeds by depriving the old stories of their intellectual and ethical complexity, turning their action into violence, their actors to dolls, and their truth-telling to sentimental platitude.
Karen Haber
#22. Platitude: All that is mortal of a departed truth.
Ambrose Bierce
#23. Funny how people despise platitudes, when they are usually the truest thing going. A thing has to be pretty true before it gets to be a platitude ...
Katharine Fullerton Gerould
#24. But that's not a very original idea, is it? It's really just a platitude ... sort of like a Florida sunset, Nevertheless, it happens to be the truth, and the truth deserves to be spoken ... if you can say it in a new way, I tried to put it in a picture.
Stephen King
#25. It is strange how long we rebel against a platitude until suddenly in a different lingo it looms up again as the only verity.
Ruth Benedict
#26. It's common platitude that knowledge is neutral but every now and then it would be useful if it was on your side and not theirs.
John Brunner
#27. The aphorism: a platitude that swerves, or slides all the way around.
Mason Cooley
#28. In modern life nothing produces such an effect as a good platitude. It makes the whole world kin.
Oscar Wilde
#29. The art of newspaper paragraphing is to stroke a platitude until it purrs like an epigram.
Don Marquis
#30. Platitude: a statement that denies by implication what it explicitly affirms.
Edward Abbey
#31. As long as matters are really hopeful," wrote Chesterton, "hope is mere flattery or platitude. It is only when everything is hopeless that hope begins to be a strength at all. Like all the Christian virtues, it is as unreasonable as it is indispensable.
Eugene H. Peterson
#32. Platitudes or otherwise, there were no words to ease the agony of living.
Catherine Cookson
