Top 100 Quotes About Falsehoods
#1. It is here, it exists - but one must enter it naked and alone, with no rags from the falsehoods of centuries, with the purest clarity of mind - not an innocent heart, but that which is much rarer: an intransigent mind - as one's only possession and key.
Ayn Rand
#2. Truth has a resonance to it that fills the cracks where falsehoods lie.
Rick DeStefanis
#3. The history of American wars is littered with propaganda, falsehoods, a compliant media, the manipulation of patriotic sentiment - everything we've seen recently, we've seen before. Time and again.
Murray Polner
#4. There are some disguised falsehoods so like truths, that 'twould be to judge ill not to be deceived by them.
Francois De La Rochefoucauld
#5. Did anyone know anything at all, or finding times when the truth didn't suit them, had they all been repeating falsehoods and nonsense for so long they no longer remembered what was fact and what was invention?
Edward W. Robertson
#6. If believing absurd falsehoods increase the odds of getting laid or avoiding predators, your brain will believe those falsehoods with all its metaphorical little heart.
Peter Watts
#7. There is a sort of gloss upon ingenious falsehoods that dazzles the imagination, but which neither belongs to, nor becomes the sober aspect of truth.
Edmund Burke
#8. And the light by which she had read the book filled with troubles, falsehoods, sorrow, and evil, flared up more brightly than ever before, lighted up for her all that had been in darkness, flickered, began to grow dim, and was quenched forever.
Leo Tolstoy
#9. We are alien to each other, and their virtues are even more repugnant to my taste than their falsehoods and false dice.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#10. [O]nce demagogy and falsehoods become routine, there isn't much for the political journalist to do except handicap the race and report on the candidate's mood.
George Packer
#11. It's a great mistake, I think, to put children off with falsehoods and nonsense, when their growing powers of observation and discrimination excite in them a desire to know about things.
Anne Sullivan
#12. Habitual liars invent falsehoods not to gain any end or even to deceive their hearers, but to amuse themselves. It is partly practice and partly habit. It requires an effort in them to speak truth.
William Hazlitt
#13. Politeness only teaches us to save others from unnecessary pain ... You are not bound by politeness to tell any falsehoods.
Maria Edgeworth
#14. Small aberrations in doctrinal teaching can lead to large and evil falsehoods.
Gordon B. Hinckley
#15. Children are natural mythologists: they beg to be told tales, and love not only to invent but to enact falsehoods.
George Santayana
#16. The way to combat noxious ideas is with other ideas. The way to combat falsehoods is with truth.
William O. Douglas
#17. For me with art and all that stuff - I like abstraction. I like contortion. I mean, it's still truth. But it's truth through the center of the individual. It doesn't necessarily mean that it's fallacies or falsehoods. It just happens to be one perception of what's happening.
Q-Tip
#18. Death is so genuine a fact that it excludes falsehoods, or betrays its emptiness; it is a touchstone that proves the gold, and dishonors the baser metal.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
#19. I don't want to lie. I dislike dishonesty. And I work in Hollywood, a town and a business that relies on a lot of falsehoods with people hiding behind different facades. I don't want to be a part of that.
David Arquette
#20. Sometimes the hardest thing about the truth is putting down the misassumptions, falsehoods, and half-truths that stand between it and you. Sometimes that's the last thing that anybody wants to do. And sometimes, it's the only thing we can do.
Mira Grant
#21. Remember, Will Henry, some falsehoods are borne of necessity not foolishness.
Rick Yancey
#22. The American people thoroughly despise and hate their newspapers; yet they seem to have no idea what to do about it, and take it for granted that they must go on reading falsehoods for the balance of their days!
Upton Sinclair
#23. Half-truths can be more pernicious than outright falsehoods.
Wendy Lesser
#24. He who has no confidence utters falsehoods, and he who utters falsehoods has no confidence.
Nachman Of Breslov
#25. I have always found fact infinitely more interesting than myths and falsehoods.
John Brunner
#26. Alternative facts are not facts. They are falsehoods.
Chuck Todd
#27. As the greatest liar tells more truths than falsehoods, so may it be said of the worst man, that he does more good than evil.
Samuel Johnson
#28. To tell the truth is to provide armament against a world too full of cruelties to be defeated with simple falsehoods. If these truths mean the world is less comforting than it might have been, it seems like a pretty small price to pay.
Mira Grant
#29. Tom's whole life was constructed on lies - falsehoods and half-truths told to make him look better, stronger, more interesting than he was.
Paula Hawkins
#30. Secularism is a religion, a religion that is understood. It has no mysteries, no mumblings, no priests, no ceremonies, no falsehoods, no miracles, and no persecutions.
Robert Green Ingersoll
#31. Blessed be the God's voice; for it is true, and falsehoods have to cease before it!
Thomas Carlyle
#32. Tangible language, which often tells more falsehoods than truths.
Abraham Lincoln
#33. My facts shall be falsehoods to the common sense. I would so state facts that they shall be significant, shall be myths or mythologic. Facts which the mind perceived, thoughts which the body thought - with these I deal.
Henry David Thoreau
#34. Any teaching of falsehoods in science classes should certainly be identified and stopped by school inspectors. School inspectors should be looking at science teachings to make sure they are evidence-based science.
Richard Dawkins
#35. A truth that disheartens because it is true is of more value than the most stimulating of falsehoods.
Maurice Maeterlinck
#36. When the dead departed, they took away any falsehoods that they might have allowed us to believe while alive; we who are left behind have to embark on a different life, since the dead are no longer here to help us deceive ourselves.
Yiyun Li
#37. The Fanaticism which discards the Scripture, under the pretense of resorting to immediate revelations is subversive of every principle of Christianity. For when they boast extravagantly of the Spirit, the tendency is always to bury the Word of God so they may make room for their own falsehoods.
John Calvin
#38. 'Tis not enough your counsel still be true; Blunt truths more mischief than nice falsehoods do.
Alexander Pope
#39. It is astonishing what force, purity, and wisdom it requires for a human being to keep clear of falsehoods.
Margaret Fuller
#40. Maybe honesty is overvalued. What's truly priceless is picking out from a stream of falsehoods the ones you most need to hear.
Jodi Picoult
#41. Human beings fear light and knowledge and power. There is a weird quirky sort of thing that happens with people. When you log on to the truth and you start to become it, it threatens them because they live with countless falsehoods.
Frederick Lenz
#42. The religion-builders have so distorted and deformed the doctrines of Jesus, so muffled them in mysticism, fancies, and falsehoods.
Thomas Jefferson
#43. Politicians nowadays treat Americans like medical orderlies treat Alzheimer's patients, telling them anything that will keep them subdued. It doesn't matter what untruths the people are fed because they will not long remember. But in politics, forgotten falsehoods almost guarantee new treachery.
James Bovard
#44. None are so hopelessly enslaved, as those who falsely believe they are free. The truth has been kept from the depth of their minds by masters who rule them with lies. They feed them on falsehoods till wrong looks like right in their eyes.
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
#45. Reason would confront falsehoods with "solid principles [to] serve as the foundation for diametrically opposed truths,
Anonymous
#46. Economic history is a never-ending series of episodes based on falsehoods and lies, not truths. It represents the path to big money. The object is to recognize the trend whose premise is false, ride that trend and step off before it is discredited.
George Soros
#48. Strange times are these in which we live when old and young are taught falsehoods in school. And the person that dares to tell the truth is called at once a lunatic and fool
Plato
#49. The human mind is an organ for the discovery of truths rather than of falsehoods.
Solomon Asch
#50. The right approach to life is one that hungers to know as many truths as one can and to avoid as many falsehoods as possible.
J.P. Moreland
#51. If we could believe that Jesus ... countenanced the follies, falsehoods and charlatanisms which his biographers father on him, ... the conclusion would be irresistible ... that he was an imposter.
Thomas Jefferson
#52. There are truths on this side of the Pyrenees which are falsehoods on the other
Michel De Montaigne
#53. What is the difference between unethical and ethical advertising? Unethical advertising uses falsehoods to deceive the public; ethical advertising uses truth to deceive the public.
Vilhjalmur Stefansson
#54. The dictum that truth always triumphs over persecution is one of the pleasant falsehoods which men repeat after one another till they pass into commonplaces, but which all experience refutes.
John Stuart Mill
#55. Falsehoods of convenience or vanity, falsehoods from which no evil immediately visible ensues, except the general degradation of human testimony, are very lightly uttered, and once uttered are sullenly supported.
Samuel Johnson
#56. Falsehoods not only disagree with truth, but usually quarell among themselves.
D.L. Moody
#57. A few men are sufficient to broach falsehoods, which are afterwards innocently diffused by successive relaters.
Samuel Johnson
#58. He who knows nothing is closer to the truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods and errors.
Thomas Jefferson
#59. We can't write a serious novel in the 21st century without acknowledging the inescapable self-awareness we're stuck with. The idea we're surrounded by falsehoods and lies. It's hard for the thinking person to believe in narratives. And yet we want some place to invest our belief.
Michael Helm
#60. For Tolkien, a myth is a story that conveys "fundamental things" - in other words, that tries to tell us about the deeper structure of things. The best myths, he argues, are not deliberately constructed falsehoods, but are rather tales woven by people to capture the echoes of deeper truths. Myths
Alister E. McGrath
#61. The truth, of course, is that a billion falsehoods told a billion times by a billion people are still false.
Travis Walton
#62. I will not utter falsehoods but I have no objection to making meaningless statements.
Richard Dawkins
#63. Who can describe
Women's hypocrisies! their subtle wiles,
Betraying smiles, feign'd tears, inconstancies!
Their painted outsides, and corrupted minds,
The sum of all their follies, and their falsehoods.
Thomas Otway
#64. A reliable way to make people believe in falsehoods is frequent repetition, because familiarity is not easily distinguished from truth. Authoritarian institutions and marketers have always known this fact.
Daniel Kahneman
#67. A mind conscious of right laughs at the falsehoods of rumour.
[Lat., Conscia mens recti famae mendacia risit.]
Ovid
#68. To stay young requires unceasing cultivation of the ability to unlearn old falsehoods.
Robert A. Heinlein
#69. A mortgaged home, an empty stomach and a ragged back know no party. We will live to write the epitaphs of the old parties: "Died of general debility, old age, and chronic falsehoods."
Mary Elizabeth Lease
#70. Ah! it is so easy to convert others. It is so difficult to convert oneself. To arrive at what one really believes, one must speak through lips different from one's own. To know the truth one must imagine myriads of falsehoods.
Oscar Wilde
#71. The idea that truth always triumphs over persecution is one of those pleasant falsehoods, which most experience refutes. History is teeming with instances of truth put down by persecution. If not put down forever, it may be set back for centuries.
John Stuart Mill
#72. We have at last ascertained that miracles can be perfectly understood; that there is nothing mysterious about them; that they are simply transparent falsehoods.
Robert Green Ingersoll
#73. It is true that the Internet can be used to disseminate falsehoods quickly, but it just as quickly roots them out and exposes them in a way that the traditional model of journalism and its closed, insular, one-way form of communication could never do.
Glenn Greenwald
#74. Many falsehoods are passing into uncontradicted history.
Samuel Johnson
#75. Partial truths or half-truths are often more insidious than total falsehoods.
Samuel P. Huntington
#76. The job of the press is to disprove the falsehoods that power invariably disseminates to protect itself.
Glenn Greenwald
#77. A reliable way of making people believe in falsehoods is frequent repetition, because familiarity is not easily distinguished from truth.
Daniel Kahneman
#78. In the world of the Internet, there are many falsehoods. Anyone can write stuff on Wikipedia, and it doesn't have to be true.
Tom Hulce
#79. I'm not quite pompous enough to think of myself as an educator or a man capable of definitive refutation of falsehoods.
John Shirley
#80. Malice, in its false witness, promotes its tale with so cunning a confusion, so mingles truths with falsehoods, surmises with certainties, causes of no moment with matters capital, that the accused can absolutely neither grant nor deny, plead innocen.
Philip Sidney
#81. Commerce makes friends, religion makes enemies; the one enriches, and the other impoverishes; the one thrives best where the truth is told, the other where falsehoods are believed.
Robert Green Ingersoll
#82. Is not cant the materia prima of the devil, from which all falsehoods, imbecilities, abominations, body themselves, from which no true thing can come? For cant is itself the properly a double-distilled lie, the second power of a lie.
Thomas Carlyle
#83. I am accustomed to hearing malicious falsehoods about myself ... But I think I have a right to resent, to object to libelous statements about my dog.
Franklin D. Roosevelt
#84. The Street Epistemologist is a philosopher and a fighter. She has savvy and street smarts that come from the school of hard knocks. She relentlessly helps others by tearing down falsehoods about whatever enshrined "truths" enslave us.
Peter Boghossian
#85. Inculcating the various competing - competing, note - falsehoods of the major faiths into small children is a form of child abuse, and a scandal.
A.C. Grayling
#86. Gray's teeth ground like millstones. At this rate, they wouldn't need a hanging. The effort required to hold his tongue in the face of these scurrilous falsehoods-it was likely to kill him.
Tessa Dare
#87. The simplest falsehoods are the strongest.
Kate Morton
#88. Total falsehoods can be easily exposed for what they are by citing exceptions to their claims. Hence, they are less likely to be accepted as the total truth.
Samuel P. Huntington
#89. We know how to speak many falsehoods that resemble real things, but we know, when we will, how to speak true things.
Hesiod
#90. Patriotism ... is a superstition artificially created and maintained through a network of lies and falsehoods; a superstition that robs man of his self-respect and dignity, and increases his arrogance and conceit.
Emma Goldman
#91. I said you lie, knave!" shouted Beaumains, drawing his sword. "And for telling such craven falsehoods, you must die!"
The knight looked plaintively at Roger. "What's wrong with this fellow?"
He was dropped on his head when he was a baby," answered Roger.
Gerald Morris
#92. The very hirelings of the press, whose trade it is to buoy up the spirits of the people. have uttered falsehoods so long, they have played off so many tricks, that their budget seems, at last, to be quite empty.
William Cobbett
#93. Among the calamities of war may be numbered the diminution of the love of truth, by the falsehoods which interest dictates, and credulity encourages.
Samuel Johnson
#94. The persistent and sustained reliance on falsehoods as the basis of policy, even in the face of massive and well-understood evidence to the contrary, seems to many Americans to have reached levels that were previously unimaginable.
Al Gore
#95. Every fact in my films is true. And yet how often do I have to read over and over again about supposed falsehoods?
Michael Moore
#96. The truth is that our self-deceptive lies range from seemingly tiny untruths to massive life-altering falsehoods about reality.
Cortney S. Warren
#97. There is a very pervasive web of falsehoods that the dreamer must wake from in order to start on her path. These are the lies of the mad world, the system of delusion maintained by human drama and ignorance.
Carolyn Elliott
#98. I just wish this social institution [religion] wasn't based on what appears to me to be a monumental hoax built on an accumulation of customs and myths directed toward proving something that isn't true.
Andy Rooney
#99. So obscure are the greatest events, as some take for granted any hearsay, whatever its source, others turn truth into falsehood, and both errors find encouragement with posterity.
Tacitus
#100. When you get right down to it, lots of things that look fancy are easy to do, and lots of things that seem easy are hard, even if you're very creative and a good artist.
Nancy Freund
