Daily Inspiration Quote by Stanley Baldwin

A platitude is a truth with its teeth pulled out by repetition. Baldwin’s line lands because it treats “tired of hearing it” as the real pivot: not whether something is true, but whether an audience still has the appetite to let that truth bite. It’s a politician’s diagnosis of public attention as a finite resource, and a quiet warning about what happens when civic life is run on slogans.

As a statesman, Baldwin wasn’t speaking from a seminar room; he was speaking from the churn of interwar Britain, when mass newspapers, radio, and party messaging accelerated the lifecycle of ideas. In that environment, “truth” doesn’t die by refutation so much as by overexposure. The phrase “simply a truth” is doing sly work: it grants the moral high ground to the much-mocked platitude, then shows how persuasion corrodes it. Repetition can turn genuine counsel into background noise, the way a public health warning becomes wallpaper.

The subtext is tactical and slightly defensive. Baldwin is acknowledging a politician’s temptation to launder complexity into comforting phrases, then blaming the audience’s fatigue when those phrases stop moving people. It’s also an alibi for inaction: if citizens roll their eyes at the obvious, leaders can claim there’s nothing left to say, only to manage.

The sting is that Baldwin frames cynicism as a sensory problem, not an ethical one. A society can be bored into bad decisions, not because it forgot what’s true, but because it got sick of hearing it.