Inane cliches/truisms you could go the rest of your life without hearing again

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Voltaire was very good at entertainingly phrased thought-terminating cliches, or entertaining phrases that would go on to become thought-terminating cliches. 'If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him' is another, since regardless of whether or not it is in fact ridiculous, offensive, and anthropologically naive it adds very little to any discussion that couldn't be just as well added in some other, less insufferably cute and smug way.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Ninjas wearing black.

They didn't?? What did they wear then?

Street clothes to blend in with the rest of the population; sometimes specific sorts of camouflage. The idea of them wearing black comes from the artistic conflation of their 'invisibility' with that of bunraku puppet theater technicians, who do dress the way ninja are commonly supposed to have.

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There also didn't tend to be particularly large age gaps in marriages outside the nobility.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Voltaire was very good at entertainingly phrased thought-terminating cliches, or entertaining phrases that would go on to become thought-terminating cliches. 'If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him' is another, since regardless of whether or not it is in fact ridiculous, offensive, and anthropologically naive it adds very little to any discussion that couldn't be just as well added in some other, less insufferably cute and smug way.

One of my favorite things ever is the bit in The Brothers Karamazov when little Kolya recites that line and Alyosha keeps asking him what it means and Kolya is flustered as he never thought the line through. 

Miguel de Unamuno, not somebody who I think always knew what was up but when he nailed it he nailed it, described it in Tragic Sense of Life as a 'repugnant and Sadducean phrase....worthy of the time-serving sceptic to whom it is attributed'.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

I'll start off with "The Holy Roman Empire is neither Holy, nor Roman, nor an Empire."  Voltaire has wrecked generations of interesting discussion on a truly unique beast with that stupid one-liner that, besides its severe accuracy problems, also serves to dismiss the topic the second it comes up.

Very true about the Holy Roman Empire. It was simply a political term for the Catholic Church at its peak. The very first thing we learned in our History of the Middle Ages was that it wasn't Holy, Roman, or an Empire.

...no.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

'A republic, not a democracy'.