Falsehood Quotes - Page 6

• Some years ago I was struck by the large number of falsehoods that I had accepted as true in my childhood, and by the highly doubtful nature of the whole edifice that I had subsequently based on them. I realized that it was necessary, once in the course of my life, to demolish everything completely and start again right from the foundations if I wanted to establish anything at all in the sciences that was stable and likely to last.

  Rene Descartes

  Numbers, Years, Childhood

  Meditationes "Meditation I" (1641)

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• This (functional - E.W.) language controls by reducing the linguistic forms and symbols of reflection, abstraction, development, contradiction; by substituting images for concepts. It denies or absorbs the transcendent vocabulary; it does not search for but establishes and imposes truth and falsehood.

  Herbert Marcuse

  Reflection, Vocabulary, Doe

  Herbert Marcuse (2013). “One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society”, p.106, Routledge

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• 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

  Knowledge And Power, Light, People

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• If we believe that he [Jesus Christ]really countenanced the follies, the falsehoods, and the charlatanisms, which his biographers [writers of the New Testament]father upon him, and admit the misconstructions, interpolations, and theorizations of the fathers of the early and the fanatics of the latter ages, the conclusion would be irresistible by every sound mind that he was an impostor.

  Thomas Jefferson

  Jesus, Father, Believe

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• . . . the fools of this world prefer to look for sages far away. They don't believe that the wisdom of their own mind is the sage . . . the sutras say, "Mind is the teaching." But people of no understanding don't believe in their own mind or that by understanding this teaching they can become a sage. They prefer to look for distant knowledge and long for things in space, buddha-images, light, incense, and colors. They fall prey to falsehood and lose their minds to insanity.

  Bodhidharma

  Believe, Fall, Teaching

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• For they (capitalists) hold as their chief heresy, in a coarser form, the fundamental falsehood that things are not made to be used but made to be sold. All the collapse of their commercial system in their own time has been due to that fallacy of forcing things on a market where there was no market; of continually increasing the power of supply without increasing the power of demand; of briefly, of always considering the man who sells the potato and never considering the man who eats it.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Men, Demand, Potatoes

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• History is nothing more than the belief in the senses, the belief in falsehood.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Belief, Senses

  Friedrich Nietzsche (2012). “The Essential Nietzsche”, p.44, Courier Corporation

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• I will not avoid doing what I think is right, though it should draw on me the whole artillery that falsehood and malice can invent, or the credulity a deluded population can swallow.

  William Murray, 1st Earl of Mansfield

  Thinking, Population, Should

  "The miscellaneous writings of Joseph Story ..., Vol. 3". Book by Joseph Story, C. C. Little and J. Brown, p. 211, 1852.

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• Falsehood always punishes itself.

  Frank Auerbach

  Lying

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• Falsehood falsehood cures

  William Shakespeare

  Mistake, Cures

  William Shakespeare (2016). “The New Oxford Shakespeare: Modern Critical Edition: The Complete Works”, p.1169, Oxford University Press

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• If there were no falsehood in the world, there would be no doubt, if there were no doubt, there would be no inquiry; if no inquiry, no wisdom, no knowledge, no genius; and Fancy herself would lie muffled up in her robe, inactive, pale, and bloated.

  Walter Savage Landor

  Lying, Doubt, Would Be

  Walter Savage Landor (1829). “Imaginary Conversations of Literary Men and Statesmen”, p.222

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• Now what I love in women is, they won't Or can't do otherwise than lie, but do it. So well, the very truth seems falsehood to it.

  Lord Byron

  Women, Lying, Wells

  Lord Byron (2009). “Don Juan”, p.486, The Floating Press

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• It is a true saying that 'one falsehood easily leads to another.'

  Marcus Tullius Cicero

  Truth

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• A man whose mind feels that it is captive would prefer to blind himself to the fact. But if he hates falsehood, he will not do so; and in that case he will have to suffer a lot. He will beat his head against the wall until he faints. He will come to again

  Simone Weil

  Wall, Hate, Men

  Simone Weil (2015). “Selected Essays, 1934-1943: Historical, Political, and Moral Writings”, p.26, Wipf and Stock Publishers

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• He hath a share of man's intelligence, but no share of man's falsehood.

  Walter Scott

  Dog, Men, Share

  Sir Walter Scott (1869). “The Talisman, The Two Drovers, My Aunt Margaret's Mirror, The Tapestried Chamber, The Laird's Jock”, p.112

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• Man can certainly keep on lying (and does so), but he cannot make truth falsehood.

  Karl Barth

  Lying, Men, Doe

  Karl Barth (2003). “Church Dogmatics The Doctrine of God, Volume 2, Part2: The Election of God; The Command of God”, p.317, Bloomsbury Publishing

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• Astronomy was born of superstition; eloquence of ambition, hatred, falsehood, and flattery; geometry of avarice; physics of an idle curiosity; and even moral philosophy of human pride. Thus the arts and sciences owe their birth to our vices.

  Jean-Baptiste Rousseau

  Art, Philosophy, Ambition

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• The truth cannot be asserted without denouncing the falsehood.

  Leslie Stephen

  Sir Leslie Stephen (1873). “Essays on Freethinking and Plainspeaking”, p.361

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• Who begins with severity, in judging of another, ends commonly with falsehood.

  Johann Kaspar Lavater

  Judging, Ends, Severity

  "Aphorisms on man. Translated from the original manuscript of the Rev. John Caspar Lavater, citizen of Zuric. ; [One line from Juvenal]" by Johann Kaspar Lavater, 1790.

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• Courage, the highest gift, that scorns to bend To mean devices for a sordid end. Courage--an independent spark from Heaven's bright throne, By which the soul stands raised, triumphant high, alone. Great in itself, not praises of the crowd, Above all vice, it stoops not to be proud. Courage, the mighty attribute of powers above, By which those great in war, are great in love. The spring of all brave acts is seated here, As falsehoods draw their sordid birth from fear.

  George Farquhar

  Courage, War, Spring

  William. II Congreve William Wycherley (John Vanbrugh and Farquhar George), William. II Wycherley, William Congreve, George Farquhar, John Vanbrugh (1840). “Dramatic Works with Biographical and Critical Notices by Leigh Hunt. - London, Moxon 1840”, p.485

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• If the soul is impartial in receiving information, it devotes to that information the share of critical investigation the information deserves, and its truth or untruth thus becomes clear. However, if the soul is infected with partisanship for a particular opinion or sect, it accepts without a moment's hesitation the information that is agreeable to it. Prejudice and partisanship obscure the critical faculty and preclude critical investigation. The results is that falsehoods are accepted and transmitted.

  Ibn Khaldun

  Soul, Receiving, Prejudice

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• The dust of controversy is merely the falsehood flying off.

  Thomas Carlyle

  Dust, Flying, Controversy

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• A wise man's kingdom is his own breast: or, if he ever looks farther, it will only be to the judgment of a select few, who are free from prejudices, and capable of examining his work. Nothing indeed can be a stronger presumption of falsehood than the approbation of the multitude; and Phocion, you know, always suspected himself of some blunder when he was attended with the applauses of the populace.

  David Hume

  Wise, Men, Stronger

  David Hume, J. Y. T. Greig (2011). “The Letters of David Hume: 1727-1765”, p.305, Oxford University Press, USA

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• If I get clear of my debts, I care not though men call me bold, glib of tongue, audacious, impudent, shameless, a fabricator of falsehoods, inventor of words, practised in lawsuits, a pettifogger, a rattle, a fox, a sharper, a knave, a dissembler, a slippery fellow, an imposter, a rogue that deserves the cat-o-nine-tails, a blackguard, a twister, a licker-up of hashes; they call all this when they meet me, if they please, I care not.

  Aristophanes

  Cat, Men, Tails

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• For politicians truth and falsehood are unimportant. So I never could become a politician - not even a church politician.

  Martin Niemoller

  Church, Politician, Truth And Falsehood

  "Martin Niemöller, 1892-1984" by James Bentley, (p. 223), 1984.

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