Top 90 Quotes About Platitudes
#1. The French are a tremendously verbal race: they kill you with their assurances, their repetitions, their reasons, their platitudes, their formulae, their propositions, their solutions.
Christina Stead
#2. 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.
Thomas Mann
#3. No platitudes, Dr. Cerrasin? No 'God doesn't give you more than you can bear' speech?" "Call me Max. Please." He looked at her. "And sometimes God breaks your fucking back." It
Kristin Hannah
#5. Politics is largely governed by sententious platitudes which are devoid of truth
Bertrand Russell
#6. Where could you go in Harrisonville?-this smalltime place haunted by by homilies, platitudes, and booshwah.
Joe Eszterhas
#7. Base words are uttered only by the base And can for such at once be understood; But noble platitudes - ah, there's a case Where the most careful scrutiny is needed To tell a voice that's genuinely good From one that's base but merely has succeeded.
W. H. Auden
#8. Given how I feel right now, I can only assume that my giving you the same bullshit platitudes earlier didn't help you, either.
Chloe Neill
#9. I am a dull fellow ... my person reeks, my conversation consists of insipid platitudes.
Jack Vance
#10. What we need is a rebirth of satire, of dissent, of irreverence, of an uncompromising insistence that phoniness is phony and platitudes are platitudinous.
Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.
#11. Except for those who think in terms of pious platitudes or dogma or narrow prejudice (and those thoughts we aren't interested in), people don't speak their beliefs easily, or publicly.
Edward R. Murrow
#12. 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.
Morgan Llywelyn
#13. The tragic reality is that there have been occasions when [Mormon] Church leaders, teachers, and writers have not told the truth they knew about difficulties of the Mormon past, but have offered to the Saints instead a mixture of platitudes, half-truths, omissions, and plausible denials.
D. Michael Quinn
#14. What is all wisdom save a collection of platitudes?
Norman Douglas
#15. I'll remember you, he thinks, and as the gun carriage, with its coffin and its dented helmet pass him by, he closes his eyes.
Nothing will bring them back. Not the words of comfortable men. Not the words of politicians. Or the platitudes of paid poets.
Anna Hope
#16. We should resist the temptation to identify our religious convictions with the platform of a party or the platitudes of favored politicians.
Ralph E. Reed Jr.
#17. It is becoming clear that the old platitudes can no longer be maintained, and that if we wish to improve our morals we must first improve our knowledge.
Havelock Ellis
#18. The real lover of cats is one who demands a clearer adjustment to the universe than ordinary household platitudes provide; one who refuses to swallow the sentimental notion that all good people love dogs, children, and horses while all bad people dislike and are disliked by such.
H.P. Lovecraft
#19. the platitudes of Americanism were horseshit. Number one, they didn't work. Number two, they weren't true. Number three, the people giving voice to them didn't believe them either.
Joseph Heller
#20. Everyone suffers; life is pain; and death is the final punctuation at the end of that sentence, so deal with it. I really think you can manage pain and suffering by living in fullness and being true to yourself and all those seemingly vapid platitudes.
Sufjan Stevens
#21. The Chautauqua Institution is truly a national treasure. It is a place for contemplation and a place for reflection, a place where platitudes and slogans can be set aside and be replaced by thoughtfulness and introspection.
Eliot Spitzer
#22. Speakers are not supposed to waste time on platitudes, but the capacity of this generation for ignoring the obvious and concentrating on the negative and the obscure is immense.
Arthur Hays Sulzberger
#23. Platitudes might satisfy for a short time, father - but soon or late, the people will realize they are being fed form without substance. What I tell them must be the truth, and I must believe it, and I must hold to it.
Mercedes Lackey
#24. In their plush melodies and plummy platitudes, many Rodgers-and-Hammerstein songs were secular hymns, which so insinuated themselves into the ear of the Eisenhower-era listener that they became the liturgical music for the American mid-century.
Richard Corliss
#25. Above all, beware of platitudes, i.e., word combinations that have already appeared a thousand times ... As a general rule, try to find new combinations of words (not for the sake of their novelty, but because every person sees things in an individual way and must find his own words for them).
Vladimir Nabokov
#27. Not easily placated
by outdated
platitudes
used to soothe
or mask
the obtuse.
Take your nonsenses-
leave.
Cheri Bauer
#28. Simple truths are never platitudes; they only become commonplace because we fail to live them profoundly.
John Furia Jr.
#29. Authority is permission to spew platitudes to people below you.
Rob Payne
#30. There is no greater mistake than to suppose that platitudes, smooth words, and timid policies offer a path to safety.
Winston Churchill
#33. She wasn't really going to church anywhere, but she remained a contemporary evangelical to the back teeth. She had lost her faith while still managing to hang on to all the platitudes.
Douglas Wilson
#34. I have too much respect for people to try to control them. But they are estranged from love, afraid to reach out and touch one another. We're afraid to appear sentimental or speak in platitudes because people will say, 'What a jerk!' It takes courage in our culture to be a lover.
Leo Buscaglia
#35. Those who misrepresent the normal experiences of life, who decry being controversial, who shun risk, are the enemies of the American way of life, whatever the piety of their vocal professions and the patriotic flavor of their platitudes.
Henry Wriston
#36. Platitudes and generalities roll of the human understanding like water from a duck
Claude C. Hopkins
#37. Those are just platitudes. Everyone has his own idea of "playing fair."
"Does he? Try making up your own idea of what's fair
say, "giving the greatest rewards to the laziest workers"
and see how seriously people take you.
J. Budziszewski
#38. 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.
Chris Hedges
#39. True gratitude, not mere verbal platitudes of thanks, is also a power in and of itself, which bursts forth from our inner being to the universe. Having received this power, the universe must respond, allowing more gifts to come our way.
Stephen Richards
#40. Things which sound like platitudes become vital, living and powerful when you have to learn them in dark tunnels.
Elisabeth Elliot
#41. She plunged into a sea of platitudes, and with the powerful breast stroke of a channel swimmer, made her confident way towards the white cliffs of the obvious.
W. Somerset Maugham
#42. I don't 'support the troops' or any of those other hollow and hypocritical platitudes uttered by Republicans and frightened Democrats. Here's what I do support: I support them coming home. I support them being treated well.
Michael Moore
#43. But we will not bury our mother. We have no interest in putting her bones in soft ground, no desire for memorials and platitudes, no feelings attached to the organic detritus of her terminated existence.
JY Yang
#44. The man who has the courage of his platitudes is always a successful man.
Van Wyck Brooks
#45. Christie led the way - with a bulldozer. The governor is blunt, brash, and self-consciously authentic, the antithesis to what turns off today's voters: flip-flopping politicians who speak in poll-tested platitudes. Yes, he's the anti-Romney.
Ron Fournier
#46. Nothing else need be said between them. No words or platitudes uttered. No fears or sins confessed. He saw absolution in her eyes. Understanding. Acceptance.
And still he gave her a moment. A warning. A chance to escape.
Because once he got his hands on her, there would be no stopping him.
Kerrigan Byrne
#47. To me, when I think of New Age, I think of crystals and rainbows and platitudes.
Marianne Williamson
#48. Platitudes? Yes, there are platitudes. Platitudes are there because they are true.
Margaret Thatcher
#49. Proverbs are always platitudes until you have personally experienced the truth of them.
Aldous Huxley
#50. It's a rare day when she speaks in anything but platitudes
all those exhausted phrases and hand-me-down ideas that cram the dump sites of contemporary wisdom
Paul Auster
#51. As is the curse of Humanity. We constantly rediscover the old and sing platitudes of its newness.
J.D. Brewer
#52. Platitudes are poor substitutes for emotions, this negative space hollowed out and without words. I know the shape of you and it has no name. I know the sound of you and the smell of you and the touch and sight and taste of you. But language departed the same day you did, leaving my mouth empty.
Tania De Rozario
#53. Ethics is not about platitudes, let alone tautologies, logic or mathematics, but about difficult choices - dilemmas.
Martin Cohen
#54. Platitudes or otherwise, there were no words to ease the agony of living.
Catherine Cookson
#55. I find talking about acting very boring, having to come out with platitudes about how terribly nice everyone is. I would much rather just do it.
Penelope Wilton
#56. The writer does not dare dream of giving the best of his individuality. No, he must never express his anger. The vacillating demands of mediocrity must be satisfied. Amuse the people, be their clown, give them platitudes about which they can laugh, shadows of truth which they can hold as truths.
Aleksandar Hemon
#57. Please don't say you're sorry, False platitudes of sorrow, of pity, of goddamned praise of being a hero, sicken me.
Dominique Eastwick
#58. If I were to envy any persons on this planet, it would be mountain hermits. You often hear old platitudes such as, 'Speak out. Be heard.' On the contrary, a breath of fresh air would be something like: 'Silence, think for at least 15 minutes, and then maybe speak out.
Criss Jami
#59. When you hear the word 'tyranny of magic' as we heard from Elder Caldell, you will know that it is the calling card of killers. Don't be fooled by their platitudes that is for the common good. Their real power is to strip us of our abilities so that they may easily conquer and rule us.
Terry Goodkind
#60. Regulated" rights are not rights. They are niceties and platitudes intended to keep the populace thinking their individual autonomy is respected by their government.
A.E. Samaan
#61. The man who discovers a new scientific truth has previously had to smash to atoms almost everything he had learnt, and arrives at the new truth with hands blood stained from the slaughter of a thousand platitudes.
Jose Ortega Y Gasset
#62. To avoid becoming chronically unemployed, people need more than platitudes offering sympathy. Career reinvention requires encouragement and guidance.
Nina Easton
#63. The process of living seems to consist in coming to realize truths so ancient and simple that, if stated, they sound like barren platitudes.
C.S. Lewis
#64. So I have gone all the way around Robin Hood's barn to arrive at the old platitudes, which I guess is the process of growing up.
Herman Wouk
#65. Free speech is intended to protect the controversial and even outrageous word; and not just comforting platitudes too mundane to need protection.
Colin Powell
#66. 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
#67. Plans become Platitudes, if you don't have Passion and Persistence to Execute them!
Manprit Kaur
#68. We shall reach greater and greater platitudes of achievment.
Richard J. Daley
#69. There is a geographical element in all belief-saying what seem profound truths in India have a way of seeming enormous platitudes in England, and vice versa . Perhaps the fundamental difference is that beneath a tropical sun individuality seems less distinct and the loss of it less important.
George Orwell
#70. So those pills that offered painless relief stayed stored on the shelf, out of the strength of her reach, high atop the altar of platitudes.
J.R. Hamantaschen
#71. [Thoreau] is a nimble skater who cuts elegant and complicated figures on a surface of frozen platitudes. Perhaps he would have been a better writer if he had not been quite so good a man.
W. Somerset Maugham
#72. Subtract miracles from Islam, Buddhism, Confucianism, or Toaism, and you have essentially the same religion left. Subtract miracles from Christianity, and you have nothing but the cliches and platitudes most American Christians get weekly (and weakly) from their pulpits.
Peter Kreeft
#73. The idea that literary theorists killed poetry dead because with their shrivelled hearts and swollen brains they are incapable of spotting a metaphor, let alone a tender feeling, is on of the more obtuse critical platitudes of our time.
Terry Eagleton
#74. Platitudes are safe, because they're easy to wink at, but truth is something else again.
Hunter S. Thompson
#75. One becomes sated with platitudes no less than honey, so that one often breaks another's bones in one's vexation.
Jack Vance
#76. The dictum that human nature cannot be changed is one of those tiresome platitudes that conceal from the ignorant the depths of their own ignorance.
Bertrand Russell
#77. This is why they say you should look before you leap. They say a lot of things. Carpe diem. Even platitudes contradict each other. Man, this has to be the longest fall ever if I have the time to think all this.
Swati Avasthi
#78. The writer who aims at producing the platitudes which are "not for an age, but for all time" has his reward in being unreadable inall ages ... The man who writes about himself and his own time is the only sort of man who writes about all people and about all time.
George Bernard Shaw
#79. I want to explore marriage without the usual Hallmark Card platitudes. Life is difficult, and I like movies that acknowledge that.
Harold Ramis
#80. There's nothing to Obama - nothing but platitudes. When it's time to get to the substance, we get contradictions and confusions. We don't think that he knows what he's talking about because it's true: He doesn't.
Rush Limbaugh
#81. As if paralyzed by the national fear of ideas, the democratic distrust of whatever strikes beneath the prevailing platitudes, it evades all resolute and honest dealing with what, after all, must be every healthy literature's elementary materials.
H.L. Mencken
#82. But platitudes are most appealing when they're least appropriate.
Phil Klay
#83. Platitude: a statement that denies by implication what it explicitly affirms.
Edward Abbey
#84. I should and can play better. That is going to be the challenge for me.
Andrew Strauss
#85. Platitude: All that is mortal of a departed truth.
Ambrose Bierce
#88. 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
#89. Where in this small-talking world can I find A longitude with no platitude?
Christopher Fry
#90. Nothing is more tedious than the dreaming platitude.
Karl Marx
