How To Use Platitude In A Sentence
-
Stone and Parker are unafraid of lampooning both paranoid megalomania and the inane platitudes of Hollywood superstars.
-
She is good reading always, however much we may sometimes pish and pshaw at the untimely poppings-in of the platitudes and crotchets (for he was that most abominable of things, a platitudinous crotcheteer) of Richard her father.
The English Novel
-
It's a trite and hackneyed old platitude - but sometimes, you do just have to stop and look at what's around you.
-
It appears to consist of him turning up at factory gates and pointing off into the middle distance, at some pipes or cables or suchlike, and mouthing platitudes about ‘jobs and prosperity’.
-
Affecting someone's conscience by grace and restraint does not mean rolling over and playing dead, muttering meaningless politically correct platitudes, or remaining silent as many find it politic to do.
-
Thinking that a few motivational platitudes and clichés will save them, the rest of the band plod on, uninspired and surrounded by yes men.
-
To cacoon and even entomb one's mind in tendentiously conceived definitions and platitudes, likewise imagining that doing so is tantamount to serious inquiry and thought, is the very hallmark of the ideological religionist, to indulge the term in a simple and purely pejorative sense.
On Thursday, the Legg report will be published along with...
-
No slippery politician was going to give me the kind of straight talk I was looking for, but only politicians and platitudes were on offer.
-
I am referring to the word that means ‘insincere talk, especially concerning morals; pious platitudes’.
-
I discovered that these folk needed far more than the pious religious platitudes I had to give them.
Christianity Today
-
Laid out on the table in front of me were the pious platitudes of Government Ministers responding to the loss of 350 permanent jobs in Donegal.
-
All you have are pat answers and glib retorts that turn out, on ten seconds' worth of thought, to be mindless platitudes.
-
He gabbled, prattling about platitudes, desperate to get out of there.
Greek crisis: The Tory plan is... there isn't one
-
Why couldn't he say something original instead of spouting the same old platitudes?
-
In this afternoon’s Queen Speech debate (quite how our esteemed representatives can spend two days debating seven minutes worth of platitudes is beyond me), the Health Secretary, Andy Burnham, described the Tories’ shambolic health policies as an ‘omnishambles’ - very ‘hip’ phraseology stolen from an Armando Ianucci penned Malcolm Tucker rant.
Smoking Guns and the Morality of Parliamentary Privilege
-
It is unsurprising, then, that the exchange led to this, a bloated tear-stick of a song that desperately wrings emotion from the blandest of platitudes.
This week's new singles
-
If he decides that you aren't, he will just give you the usual platitudes.
Times, Sunday Times
-
Mr Morrigon's secretary was at her side muttering platitudes about the weather and asking her how many sugars she'd like in her coffee.
-
No slippery politician was going to give me the kind of straight talk I was looking for, but only politicians and platitudes were on offer.
-
Step Into Liquid is a surfing documentary that offers a satisfactory amount of thrills within a tsunami of platitudes and hyperbole.
-
You decorate a bus with your name writ large, pump up the patriotic platitudes, head out on an "all-American road trip" and, by golly, you just can't understand what all the fuss is about.
NPR Topics: News
-
Now she mouths all the normal platitudes about how the Real Message of the Gospel is Social Justice.
-
It's pretty much downhill from there, with everyone speaking in moral platitudes and Hanks looking troubled.
-
It recrudesced the laughter and the song, and put a lilt into my own imagination so that I could laugh and sing and say foolish things with the liveliest of them, or platitudes with verve and intensity to the satisfaction of the pompous mediocre ones who knew no other way to talk.
Chapter 29
-
We have more pious language, more platitudes, no clear definition, no consistency, and no clarity for those people who have to work under the Act.
-
What I heard was a seemingly endless string of mind-numbing platitudes.
-
‘The ‘great’ national historian Macaulay,’ Trotsky wrote, ‘vulgarises the social drama of the seventeenth century by obscuring the inner struggle of forces with platitudes that are sometimes interesting but always superficial.’
-
Now at the top of the local politics food chain, Adams 'weaknesses are revealed, and the revelation is a yawner: Adams is, in fact, a mediocre leader who's finding out that the smarmy platitudes are no longer sufficient, and cannot replace leadership, real ethics, and courageous judgement.
Tick, tick, tick (Jack Bog's Blog)
-
That failure could be his Achilles' heel, for whenever he addresses environmental activist groups he offers platitudes, but little promise of action.
-
But all Wright does is repeat platitudes from his last confab at Brookings.
-
Both of them are currently mouthing the proper platitudes.
-
We must lift our eyes from the misleading and myopic platitudes of our politicians and look to the future.
-
This year more than ever, the hack politician's laziest platitude is true: ‘This election is about the future.’
-
I don't mean that anyone should offer platitudes to people who may have lost their jobs or their savings.
Times, Sunday Times
-
This is a cop show that dispenses with all the worn-out platitudes of cop shows.
Times, Sunday Times
-
For almost 6 hours he nailed all of his supporters in the National Assembly, the diplomatic corps, a large group of Venezuelan public servants and soldiers who probably had better things to do such as repair highways than to listen the answerless rant of Chavez, a long string of platitudes, accusations, bad jokes and assorted vulgarities.
The Church, in Chile and in Venezuela
-
As you sidle up close you can hear voices swapping art world gossip, platitudes and dirt on various celebs, institutions and artists.
-
They should stop playing to the public gallery by mouthing platitudes and begin thinking seriously about the very nature of crime and punishment.
-
It is fitting that a playwright whose best works apotheosize the platitude compiled a book on the theater crammed with platitudes.
Ionesco: the Theater of the Banal
-
And though "don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good" makes for a usually-wise platitude, Voltaire wasn't dealing with the exorbitance of American health care or the ecological cataclysm of global warming.
Obama's Agenda: Hope, Change and Lobby-Centricity
-
This is both a trite platitude and a profound proscription.
-
I'm sort of put off by people who make their livings--and I'm beginning to sound like my ancient mentor of the moment, Charles Ives--off of fiction and then claim to be reality philosophers and therefore the only observers able to fairly understand why multitudes of world folk follow the foolish and deadly biases and fears, off-the-wall platitudes, and alchemistic sciences of ancient imagination, an uneducated imagination.
Books Again
-
What stopped this from being a pious platitude was his accompanying insistence that the objective could be achieved by reform.
-
Platitudes, hortatory admonitions, and boilerplate solutions proffered by such international agencies as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund won't take Africans very far.
-
He just kept serving up affable platitudes.
-
He didn't offer platitudes or pollute the night with diversionary talk.
TOGETHER ALONE
-
The company quickly reverted to the more standard practice of mouthing platitudes instead of the bald-faced truth.
-
There are no bromides, no platitudes, no clichés.
-
They will utter platitudes deploring the brutal murder of a pensioner; but what gets their adrenalin pumping is knee-jerk, liberal indignation at any proposals to make life hard for criminals.
-
Several other speakers delivered generalities and platitudes, many of which ignored the honored president entirely.
-
We get the usual platitudes with a side serving of Except there's one thing.
Times, Sunday Times
-
The former manager attempted to enounce typical TV platitudes over Rangers' lack of cohesion on Wednesday night's post mortem.
-
His answer to all these questions is the pious platitude, ‘one standard of citizenship’.
-
Those expressions of admiration were not mere dutiful platitudes inspired by the passing of a respected colleague.
-
Instead of mouthing platitudes about creating just and lasting settlements, we must turn the financial screws on both parties to make them see sense.
-
Its unpleasantness must not be buried in moral and philosophical platitudes.
-
He has long abandoned the belief that one must speak in pious platitudes about doing what the framers intended, or not legislating from the bench.
Balkinization
-
Adults while knowing better pretended clarity they lacked and asserted platitudes they disbelieved, hoping to spare their children the pain of unrealizable dreams.
James Block: From Occupy to Progressive Renewal: Demanding the Just Society
-
If one is looking for pious platitudes, this is not the place to come.
-
No longer was there an attempt to dismiss the obvious with platitudes.
Times, Sunday Times
-
He should be forced to face up to his platitudes and obfuscations over the past four years.
-
In the later scenes, it grows more formulaic, galloping towards a happy ending with unseemly haste, burdening the actors with unconvincing old age make-up and testing the audience with corny platitudes.
-
‘I'm proud of my guys,’ Valentine, the Mets' manager said, offering the platitudes of a loser.
-
We shall have to listen to more platitudes about the dangers of overspending.
-
But strip away the platitudes and cheap applause lines about freedom, self-reliance and the virtues of capitalism, and you're left with the subject that really interests Rush Limbaugh: himself.
Fools Rush In
-
Cliched platitudes about derby matches may be easy enough to pick up, but there are still occasional communication difficulties between player and manager.
-
Hunter's work may refer to the classics but it's far from the platitudes and cliches of your average public monument.
-
Beyond a certain point such platitudes insults voters' intelligence.
Times, Sunday Times
-
That would include sharp-tongued humor, strong observation, and surprising insights, not platitudes and legalisms.
-
I don't mean this as some sort of a "Pollyanna" platitude, but as a serious reflection on our world and who we are becoming at this particular time in human history.
Jim Selman: Why This Is the Best Time to Be Alive
-
She waits for another useless barrage of platitudes and axioms, but all she catches is the harsh rasp of his breathing.
-
These releases offer no new messages of hope or redemption, only old platitudes.
Times, Sunday Times
-
Nor does he offer pious platitudes.
Christianity Today
-
Despite its grab-life-by-the-horns platitudes and sappy ending, this feel-good debut is a lively read.
-
But while leading figures in other sports often speak out on matters that affect their livelihoods, footballers hush up or are airbrushed into meaningless platitudes.
-
The guy is just sitting on his hands, while mouthing platitudes.
-
But if we take the task of analyzing terms to be that of making explicit and systematizing the platitudes employing that term affirmed by masterful users of that term (Smith 1994, pp. 29-32), and we note that many thoughtful Jews and Christians who otherwise appear to be masterful users of the language of moral obligation have rejected, either explicitly or implicitly, the notion that an act is obligatory if and only if it has been commanded by God, then we would have some reason to doubt whether the analysis formulation of theological voluntarism is defensible.
Theological Voluntarism
-
I discovered that these folk needed far more than the pious religious platitudes I had to give them.
Christianity Today
-
The Cult of Obama ... the pontifications and platitudes never end, and yet ask some of the young folks out there while they are voting ofr him, all they can reiterate is something pablum "esques.
She may have a crush on Obama
-
Speak platitudes in English, foment terrorism in Arabic and the United States will apply pressure to fellow democracies over and against those who rule by bullets rather than ballots.
CNN Transcript Mar 25, 2002
-
Little has been said to promote the benefits of a mega union for existing members and unorganised workers, beyond the platitudes of ‘bigger means stronger’ and ‘economies of scale’.
-
Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu, delivered a statement at what is called the 'High Segment' beginning of the 13th session of the Human Rights Council (I prefer the word 'highfalutin' as it is taken up with speeches by ministers from different States, often repeating the same platitudes).
Jihad Watch
-
But the voters have had enough of her grim, frozen face and endless meaningless platitudes.
The Sun
-
The environment minister is being condemned for mouthing politically correct platitudes.
-
Most disconcertingly, many of their public statements are Bush 43 redux, a smorgasbord of overly-optimistic platitudes utterly dichotomized from economic realities.
Sheldon Filger: Obama's Economic Crisis Team is Full of Green Shoots
-
From ‘co-production’ to the ‘proactive de-concentration of deprivation’, the government's regeneration policy is stuffed full of jargonised platitudes.
-
I discovered that these folk needed far more than the pious religious platitudes I had to give them.
Christianity Today
-
Less sensible platitudes are currently issuing from the mouths of our leaders.
-
He was mouthing the usual platitudes about the need for more compassion.
-
They seek to dissolve all concrete issues of history, politics and economics into the ethereal mists of moral platitudes.
-
It is not enough for Blair simply to utter platitudes.
-
She said that people should be wary of mouthing platitudes.
-
But it's such an infuriatingly bland blend of pop-psychology, unironic platitudes and meandering rock, I wouldn't stop at politely sweeping it under the rug.
-
Surely so important a figure in cinema and so charismatic a star deserves something better than anecdotage, gossip and platitudes for the story of his life, career and times.
-
So says The Knife, who, as their name suggests, are not a conventional band content to offer vacuous platitudes served on a diet of mediocrity.
-
Here is the unlooked for affirmation, a new physics in which smoke ‘stands’ while windows ‘stream’ and brick is ‘white’ and ‘fireproof; or else/it isn't'. And of course, there is the platitude: ‘no smoke without fire’.
-
It's a trite and hackneyed old platitude - but sometimes, you do just have to stop and look at what's around you.
-
Atkinson's failure to send off Chelsea's David Luiz for a glaring second bookable offence and the dismissal of Arsenal's Robin van Persie for going through with a shot after the whistle had blown for offside were too grievous to dismiss with platitudes.
Hardline defence of referees is a symptom of failure | Paul Hayward
-
I personally am sickened by those who hide behind empty platitudes in furtherance of justification of raping and killing innocent and weak people under specious claims of justification.
The Volokh Conspiracy » Greenwald and Gaza
-
Divested of their high-sounding platitudes, these programs were intended to train the nation's future leaders.
-
McDonnell's yet-to-be-delivered statement opens with self-serving platitudes and praise for the committee.
-
Adults while knowing better pretended clarity they lacked and asserted platitudes they disbelieved, hoping to spare their children the pain of unrealizable dreams.
James Block: From Occupy to Progressive Renewal: Demanding the Just Society
-
Repent, they admonish, and come back to signing agreements and mouthing platitudes.
-
It is easier to fill our political platforms with a rainbow of complexions, to join enthusiastically once a year on Martin Luther King's birthday to utter platitudes about equality.
Race, Class, and Reconciliaton
-
In a vague echo of '60s counterculture and New Age platitudes, these crusades are likened to the sacred quest for human freedom.
-
They never draw from things that people on the right learn, and usually go out of their way to point out that things people on the right learn are incorrect, and even in the more rightish moments they try to ameliorate them with lefty platitudes.
That CAPTAIN AMERICA thing
-
Craig Storper's adaptation of Lauran Paine's novel is riddled with cornball dialogue that unfolds in grindingly earnest platitudes.
-
The speaker seems to have no original ideas; his speech was full of platitudes.
-
When he says he expects to win, he will likely be speaking out of sincere conviction, not simply mouthing platitudes like many other candidates.
-
Yet it has evolved as the major challenge of our day, demanding responses beyond pious platitudes.
-
One critic once said that George Eliot was the only English writer who was into sermonising and moral platitudes.
-
Instead of the usual earnest platitudes, big oil should get tough in Copenhagen.
Times, Sunday Times
-
I agree with Deacon that the platitude that liberals think ‘people are basically good,’ which we all learned in our college government courses, is out of date.
-
Gone are (some of) the moral platitudes, and in their place are actual critiques and questions.
-
Yes, it was full of platitudes, buzz-words, admin-speak and woolly bureaucratic twaddle, but in its own earnest way, it was an attempt to take the cultural health of the nation seriously.
-
On two continents, they incontinently spout platitudes, nonsense, tall tales, or pseudopoetic fantasies.
-
Realistic promotion of abstinence is not the mere mouthing of platitudes such as ‘Just say ‘No’!’
-
We shall have to listen to more platitudes about the dangers of overspending.
-
But after the platitudes — which they call principles — everything turned strange.
CPAC: Conservatives Pout and Complain
-
The idea that the kids are whizzes at multimedia tasking is a platitude confected by middle-aged techno gurus to peddle their expertise as explainers of generational difference.
Time For A Slow-Word Movement
-
He can only mouth the same old platitudes to audiences who already agree with him.
Times, Sunday Times
-
No longer was there an attempt to dismiss the obvious with platitudes.
Times, Sunday Times
-
Were one to say that thoughts about hydrostatics and pneumatics are difficult to the multitude, or that mental efforts in regions of political economy or ethical philosophy are beyond ordinary reach, one would only pronounce an evident truism, an absurd platitude.
Castle Richmond
-
Even so, despite her ‘inner beauty’ platitudes, she's voted off the fats, baldies and dental monstrosities in an entirely predictable manner.
-
Either way the film ruined all its best quotable lines by allowing them to devolve into platitudes.
Christianity Today
-
She has a doctorate in biochemistry from the University of Chicago and works as a researcher for a large drug company outside Princeton, but much like her mother before her, it's a rare day when she speaks in anything but platitudesall those exhausted phrases and hand-me-down ideas that cram the dump sites of contemporary wisdom.
Excerpt: The Brooklyn Follies by Paul Auster
-
Once again, there is no sign of any reaction from the United Nations beyond pious platitudes.
-
So instead politicians almost uniformly retreat to the safety of the platitude and commonplace.
-
In their place, Echenoz proposes a rhetoric of platitude, insisting upon the commonplace, the dull, the ordinary.
-
Platitudes go unshared; the generation gap remains unbridged.
The Times Literary Supplement
-
I thought they never looked so handsome before; and close by them were the sharking priests, and not far from them was that idiotical parson Platitude, winking and grinning, and occasionally lifting up his hands as if in ecstasy at what he saw and heard, so that he drew upon himself the notice of the congregation.
Lavengro
-
The other two are gratuities, and while one could argue both gratuities and platitudes are pleasantries, that doesn't make one the other.
-
But members of the Omagh victims' group are not content with such platitudes.
-
The problem with the Republican Party today and the conservative movement is all those Republicans and so-called conservatives who bdo stab us in the back by voting and acting like liberals all the while they are mouthing conservative platitudes.
Challenging John McCain - Erick’s blog - RedState
-
It represents nothing more than banality, platitudes, and outrageous nonsense clumsily conveyed by insipid prose.
-
Those who did believe me offered no solace; only sympathy and empty platitudes.
-
It would be just another speech, just another collection of euphonious platitudes - if it weren't for the sword we've slowly unsheathed over the last six months.
-
He has "mastered the art of saying nothing" with his excessive use of platitudes of emptiness that reinforce mistaken ideas.
-
Imagine if this presidential election cycle, rather than trading in gauzy platitudes on one hand, and restatements of indurated positions on the other, could actually rise to the level of debating the philosophical issues that derive from legitimate questions about the role of government in our lives.
Adam Hanft: Gun Control, Health Privacy, 5-4: Time for a Conversation About... Ugh... Philosophy
-
I called attention to the failure of his paper, not in a spirit of rejoicing over its downfall, but simply to accenuate the fact, after giving some years to consideration of his rather pretty platitudes, that people condemned them -- that his heroic attempt to reclothe with living flesh the bones of the impot unique had proven a dismal failure.
The Complete Works of Brann the Iconoclast, Volume 10
-
With all this in mind, I wish I liked the film more, but even nine years on, Jesse and Celine still strike me as a pair of self-involved, faux intellectuals spouting empty platitudes.
-
Instead he chose a few bland platitudes.
The Sun
-
As if in a hurry to get to the showers, Duncan, when wound up, dumps a fusilade of platitudes along a desolate stretch of disordered sentences that are too impatient to hold separate ideas apart, that roll out of his mouth or onto the page as instant bundled cliches that would have been better off had they never been put into a position to need forgetting.
Archive 2009-03-01
-
He just spouts Marxist platitudes and courts his women in a thoroughly conventional way.
-
It is not only some politicians who have been guilty of sonorous but meaningless platitudes in the wake of the election result.
Times, Sunday Times
-
Parenting platitudes and recipe tips for clafoutis only go so far.
Times, Sunday Times
-
His answer to all these questions is the pious platitude, ‘one standard of citizenship’.
-
He will not offer platitudes about encouragement.
Times, Sunday Times
-
Either way the film ruined all its best quotable lines by allowing them to devolve into platitudes.
Christianity Today
-
His hastily rewritten conference speech will have to offer more than platitudes about consulting the people.
Times, Sunday Times
-
This is a cop show that dispenses with all the worn-out platitudes of cop shows.
Times, Sunday Times
-
No longer was there an attempt to dismiss the obvious with platitudes.
Times, Sunday Times
-
He never pushed his will on her, didn't slobber over her, filling her ears with cheap platitudes and hollow compliments.
-
What you quite often have when you listen to a politician is either geekspeak with a zillion statistics, or a platitude.
-
No longer was there an attempt to dismiss the obvious with platitudes.
Times, Sunday Times
-
In the meantime, politicians burble platitudes about inadequate controls and lack of prudential oversight.
Times, Sunday Times
-
It moves with a dynamic confidence that earns the moniker "sport sedan," rather than abusing the term as a platitude.
News - latimes.com
-
Here, in one neat package, we have all the platitudes.
-
Beyond a certain point such platitudes insults voters' intelligence.
Times, Sunday Times
