“cliches are truisms and all truisms are true”

“You don't get to be a respected intellectual by uttering truisms in monosyllables.”

“There is only one thing that it requires real courage to say, and that is a truism.”

“Decide on some imperfect Somebody and you will win, because the truest truism in politics is: You can’t beat Somebody with Nobody.”

“One's doing well if age improves even slightly one's capacity to hold on to that vital truism: "This too shall pass.”

“The act of defending any of the cardinal virtues has today all the exhilaration of a vice. Moral truisms have been so much disputed that they have begun to sparkle like so many brilliant paradoxes.”

“In the past two years, the world has seen how true that is and has come to see this approach as the right one. Let us remember the old truism that prevention is better than cure. This is how we can finally triumph over the HIV/AIDS pandemic.”

“A mere verbal formula often distinguishes a truism from a paradox. ‘It is the duty of society to protect the weak;’ but protection cannot be efficient without the power of control; therefore, ‘It is the duty of society to enslave the weak’.”

“The life of God — the life which the mind apprehends and enjoys as it rises to the absolute unity of all things — may be described as a play of love with itself; but this idea sinks to an edifying truism, or even to a platitude, when it does not embrace in it the earnestness, the pain, the patience, and labor, involved in the negative aspect of things.”

“It is, of course, merely a truism to say that war, like other social or political evils, is the outcome of the bad management of human society, which is, in its turn, due to certain errors or deficiencies. But our task is to discern the sort of error or deficiency.”