Free speech is intended to protect the controversial and even outrageous word; and not just comforting platitudes too mundane to need protection.
Platitudes are safe, because they're easy to wink at, but truth is something else again.
The man who has the courage of his platitudes is always a successful man.
I want to explore marriage without the usual Hallmark Card platitudes. Life is difficult, and I like movies that acknowledge that.
Platitude: All that is mortal of a departed truth.
Once he could read and write he would have a mind fit to rule. So ran the democratic doctrine. But instead of a mind, universal literacy has given him rubber stamps, rubber stamps inked with advertising slogans, with editorials, with published scientific data, with the trivialities of the tabloids and the platitudes of history, but quite innocent of original thought.
Literature is the orchestration of platitudes.
Where in this small-talking world can I find A longitude with no platitude?
Platitudes? Yes, there are platitudes. Platitudes are there because they are true.
Platitude: a statement that denies by implication what it explicitly affirms.
Principles without programs are platitudes.
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.
Politics is largely governed by sententious platitudes which are devoid of truth
Proverbs are always platitudes until you have personally experienced the truth of them.
applause, n. The echo of a platitude.
Most of our platitudes notwithstanding, self-deception remains the most difficult deception. The tricks that work on others count for nothing in that very well-lit back alley where one keeps assignation with oneself: no winning smiles will do here, no prettily drawn lists of good intentions. One shuffles flashily but in vain through one's marked cards- the kindness done for the wrong reason, the apparent triumph which involved no real effort, the seemingly heroic act into which one had been shamed.
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.
We shall reach greater and greater platitudes of achievment.
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.
Our society is just less open to platitudes, more open to stories.
