Falsehood Quotes - page 6

In the land of small dogs we are all card-sharpers, we do everything in fun: in fun we feed all the small dogs with the crumbs of our feeling; in fun we make out we love every little dog we meet, and no one therefore can love properly in the land of small dogs; there is nothing genuine. Not even falsehood is genuine. (Stig Dagerman)
I am sufficiently intelligent to be able to differentiate between real falsehood, which is aimed at hurting people, and a wise moderation of so-called truth, whose only object is to simplify life for all concerned. View quote
Stig Dagerman
Who speaks the truth stabs Falsehood to the heart. View quote
James Russell Lowell
Telling the truth to people who misunderstand you is generally promoting a falsehood, isn't it? View quote
Anthony Hope
God knows that I would rather stand in the lowest place within the Truth, than in the highest without it. Nay, outside the Truth the higher the worse. It is only so much more opposition to Truth, so much more propagation of falsehood. View quote
Henry Edward Manning
Every orthodox church is founded on mistake and falsehood. Every good orthodox minister asserts what he does not know, and denies what he does know. View quote
Robert G. Ingersoll
Arguments cannot be answered by personal abuse; there is no logic in slander, and falsehood, in the long run, defeats itself. View quote
Robert G. Ingersoll
When falsehood can look so like the truth, who can assure themselves of certain happiness? View quote
Mary Shelley
Communists, socialists and fascists everywhere, from Mr. Obama upward, have taken to the global warming cause like a quack to colored water. Just about every word they utter on this subject is a falsehood calculated to deceive, or - in plain English - a lie. View quote
Christopher Monckton
All students of man and society who possess that first requisite for so difficult a study, a due sense of its difficulties, are aware that the besetting danger is not so much of embracing falsehood for true, as of mistaking part of the truth for the whole. View quote
John Stuart Mill
I would like to point out how this travesty was made possible, how it sprang out of the machinations of Major du Paty de Clam, how Generals Mercier, de Boisdeffre and Gonse became so ensnared in this falsehood that they would later feel compelled to impose it as holy and indisputable truth. Having set it all in motion merely by carelessness and lack of intelligence, they seem at worst to have given in to the religious bias of their milieu and the prejudices of their class. In the end, they allowed stupidity to prevail. (Émile Zola)
Those who won our independence by revolution were not cowards. They did not fear political change. They did not exalt order at the cost of liberty. To courageous, self-reliant men, with confidence in the power of free and fearless reasoning applied through the processes of popular government, no danger flowing from speech can be deemed clear and present, unless the incidence of the evil apprehended is so imminent that it may befall before there is opportunity for full discussion. If there be time to expose through discussion the falsehood and fallacies, to avert the evil by the processes of education, the remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence. View quote
Louis Brandeis
For a government to declare a vice to be a crime, and to punish it as such, is an attempt to falsify the very nature of things. It is as absurd as it would be to declare truth to be a falsehood, or falsehood a truth. View quote
Lysander Spooner
The priest is the personification of falsehood. View quote
Giuseppe Garibaldi
It is perilous to separate thinking rightly from acting rightly. He is already half false who speculates on truth and does not do it. Truth is given, not to be contemplated, but to be done. Life is an action - not a thought. And the penalty paid by him who speculates on truth, is that by degrees the very truth he holds becomes a falsehood. View quote
Frederick William Robertson
These pseudo‑events which flood our consciousness must be distinguished from propaganda. The two do have some characteristics in common. But our peculiar problems come from the fact that pseudo‑events are in some respects the op­posite of the propaganda which rules totalitarian countries. Propaganda - as prescribed, say, by Hitler in Mein Kampf - is information intentionally biased. Its effect depends pri­marily on its emotional appeal. While a pseudo‑event is an ambiguous truth, propaganda is an appealing falsehood. Pseudo‑events thrive on our honest desire to be informed, to have "all the facts,” and even to have more facts than there really are. View quote
Daniel J. Boorstin
An unjust composition never fails to contain error and falsehood. Therefore an unjust connection of ideas is not derived from nature, but from the imperfect composition of man. Misconnection of ideas is the same as misjudging, and has no positive existence, being merely a creature of the imagination; but nature and truth are real and uniform; and the rational mind by reasoning, discerns the uniformity, and is thereby enabled to make a just composition of ideas, which will stand the test of truth. But the fantastical illuminations of the credulous and superstitious part of mankind, proceed from weakness, and as far as they take place in the world subvert the religion of REASON, NATURE and TRUTH. View quote
Ethan Allen
The love where Death has set his seal, Nor age can chill, nor rival steal, Nor falsehood disavow. View quote
Lord Byron
Truth may be stretched, but cannot be broken, and always gets above falsehood, as does oil above water. View quote
Miguel de Cervantes
Falsehood is cowardice, the truth courage. View quote
Hosea Ballou
Exaggeration is a blood relation to falsehood and nearly as blamable. (Hosea Ballou)
When we were told that by freedom we understood free enterprise, we did very little to dispel this monstrous falsehood. Wealth and economic well-being, we have asserted, are the fruits of freedom, while we should have been the first to know that this kind of ''happiness'' has been an unmixed blessing only in this country, and it is a minor blessing compared with the truly political freedoms, such as freedom of speech and thought, of assembly and association, even under the best conditions. View quote
Hannah Arendt
An autonomous electorate, free because it is free from indoctrination and manipulation, would indeed be on a "level of articulate opinion and ideology” which is not likely to be found. Therefore, the concept has to be rejected as "unrealistic”-has to be if one accepts the factually prevailing level of opinion and ideology as prescribing the valid criteria for sociological analysis. And-if indoctrination and manipulation have reached the stage where the prevailing level of opinion has become a level of falsehood, where the actual state of affairs is no longer recognized as that which it is, then an analysis which is methodologically committed to reject transitive concepts commits itself to a false consciousness. Its very empiricism is ideological. View quote
Herbert Marcuse
One might, for example, speak of an unforgettable life or moment even if all men had forgotten it. If the nature of such a life or moment required that it be unforgotten, that predicate would imply not a falsehood but merely a claim unfulfilled by men, and probably also a reference to a realm in which it is fulfilled: God's remembrance. View quote
Walter Benjamin
For the Romantics and for speculative philosophy, ... to be critical meant to elevate thinking so far beyond all restrictive conditions that the knowledge of truth sprang forth magically, as it were, from insight into the falsehood of these restrictions. View quote
Walter Benjamin