False Quotes - page 10

The old and oft-repeated proposition "Totum est majus sua parte" [the whole is larger than the part] may be applied without proof only in the case of entities that are based upon whole and part; then and only then is it an undeniable consequence of the concepts "totum" and "pars". Unfortunately, however, this "axiom" is used innumerably often without any basis and in neglect of the necessary distinction between "reality" and "quantity", on the one hand, and "number" and "set", on the other, precisely in the sense in which it is generally false. (Georg Cantor)
The great renewal of the world will perhaps consist in this, that man and maid, freed of all false feelings and reluctances, will seek each other not as opposites, but as brother and sister, as neighbors, and will come together as human beings. View quote
Rainer Maria Rilke
Wherever Mathematics is mixed up with anything, which is outside its field, you will find attempts to demonstrate these merely conventional propositions a priori, and it will be your task to find out the false deduction in each case. View quote
Carl Gustav Jacob Jacobi
The greatest enemy of progress is not stagnation, but false progress. View quote
Sydney J. Harris
I am not only convinced that what I say is false, but also that what one might say against it is false. Despite this, one must begin to talk about it. In such a case the truth lies not in the middle, but rather all around, like a sack, which, with each new opinion one stuffs into it, changes its form, and becomes more and more firm. View quote
Robert Musil
If the world is an aggregate of relatively independent regions, then any assumption of universal laws is false and a demand for universal norms tyrannical: only brute force (or seductive deception) can then bend the different moralities so that they fit the prescriptions of a single ethical system. And indeed, the idea of universal laws of nature and society arose in connection with a life-and-death battle: the battle that gave Zeus the power over the Titans and all other gods and thus turned his laws into the laws of the universe. View quote
Paul Karl Feyerabend
The salat can be made up for, but there is no making up for false show or outward worship without presence. View quote
Shams Tabrizi
I will not deny but that the best apology against false accusers is silence and sufferance, and honest deeds set against dishonest words. View quote
John Milton
A thing is not necessarily true because badly uttered, nor false because spoken magnificently. View quote
Augustine of Hippo
Don't forget that few people are likely to tell more than a small part of the truth: no one tells much of the truth, let alone the whole truth. Spoken words are facts in themselves, whether true or false. When people talk they reveal themselves, whether they're lying or telling the truth. View quote
Halldór Laxness
In regard to propaganda the early advocates of universal literacy and a free press envisaged only two possibilities: the propaganda might be true, or the propaganda might be false. They did not foresee what in fact has happened, above all in our Western capitalist democracies - the development of a vast mass communications industry, concerned in the main neither with the true nor the false, but with the unreal, the more or less totally irrelevant. In a word, they failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions. (Aldous Huxley)
Children are nowhere taught, in any systematic way, to distinguish true from false, or meaningful from meaningless, statements. Why is this so? Because their elders, even in the democratic countries, do not want them to be given this kind of education. View quote
Aldous Huxley
The effectiveness of political and religious propaganda depends upon the methods employed, not upon the doctrines taught. These doctrines may be true or false, wholesome or pernicious-it makes little or no difference. View quote
Aldous Huxley
Occasionally I talk with people who see doctors as people who do nothing but give of themselves and never receive from anyone else - especially not from their patients. That is totally false. The longer I remain in my profession, the more I realize how much I receive from those who come to me for help. View quote
Ben Carson
Had it not been for you, I should have remained what I was when we first met, a prejudiced, narrow-minded being, with contracted sympathies and false knowledge, wasting my life on obsolete trifles, and utterly insensible to the privilege of living in this wondrous age of change and progress. View quote
Benjamin Disraeli
The present system of taking oaths is horrible. It is awfully absurd to make a man invoke God's wrath upon himself, if he speaks false; it is, in my judgment, a sin to do so. View quote
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Can we find nothing good to say about TV? Well, yes, it brings scattered solitaries into a sort of communion. TV allows your isolated American to think that he participates in the life of the entire country. It does not actually place him in a community, but his heart is warmed with the suggestion (on the whole false) that there is a community somewhere in the vicinity and that his atomized consciousness will be drawn back toward the whole. View quote
Saul Bellow
My films are intended as polemical statements against the American 'barrel down' cinema and its dis-empowerment of the spectator. They are an appeal for a cinema of insistent questions instead of false (because too quick) answers, for clarifying distance in place of violating closeness, for provocation and dialogue instead of consumption and consensus. View quote
Michael Haneke
[The masses] ... must turn their hopes toward a miracle. In the depths of their despair reason cannot be believed, truth must be false, and lies must be truth. "Higher bread prices," "lower bread prices," "unchanged bread prices" have all failed. The only hope lies in a kind of bread price which is none of these, which nobody has ever seen before, and which belies the evidence of one's reason. View quote
Peter Drucker
The atheist staring from his attic window is often nearer to God than the believer caught up in his own false image of God. View quote
Martin Buber
An artist needs knowledge and the power of observation only so that he can tell from what he is abstaining, and to be sure that his abstention will not appear artificial or false. (Andrei Tarkovsky)
To some extent we are all the prisoners of stereotypes; we see each other in terms of distorted and oversimplified images. Better communication in the realm of ideas, of the arts, and of science can help refashion these false images. And by seeing more clearly we may act more wisely. View quote
Chester Bowles
The majority believes that everything hard to comprehend must be very profound. This is incorrect. What is hard to understand is what is immature, unclear and often false. The highest wisdom is simple and passes through the brain directly to the heart. -- Viktor Schauberger. View quote
Viktor Schauberger
In tragic life, God wot, No villain need be! Passions spin the plot: We are betrayed by what is false within. View quote
George Meredith
The people who were honored in the Bible were the false prophets. It was the ones we call the prophets who were jailed and driven into the desert. View quote
Noam Chomsky