Since they definitely work to some extent, it's probably a good thing to be aware of, and alert for, rhetorical devices.
Such perfect sounding phrases are very persuasive...but
perhaps a useful counter action, to lay their actual logic bare, would
be to swap the terms used, and to see if it is the content or the form which is swayin gus.
So, for example with the well known 'when the going gets tough, the tough get going' (using antimetabole - the repetition of words in successive clauses, but in transposed grammatical order), one could change it to produce a similar sound bite, but with the opposite moral "when going on is stupid, the stupid go on".
It is perhaps understandable why Aristotle once suggested story tellers should be expelled from Athens, since manipulation via the telling, is the most insidious danger of all.
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