Thought-Terminating Cliché
A commonly used phrase, sometimes passing as folk wisdom, used to quell cognitive dissonance, conceal lack of forethought, move on to other topics, etc. but in any case, to end the debate with a cliché rather than a point.
Origin
American psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton popularized the term in his 1961 book Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism. Lifton's research began in 1953, interviewing American servicemen held captive during the Korean War and Chinese who fled Communist indoctrination. He identified how thought-terminating clichés—phrases that compress complex problems into brief, reductive statements—functioned as "the language of non-thought," ending ideological analysis rather than engaging with it. Lifton called this tactic, alongside "loading the language," a mechanism of ideological totalism.