Untrue Quotes

All your life people will tell you things. And most of the time, probably ninety-five percent of the time, what they'll tell you will be wrong.

Michael Crichton

Life, People, Ninety

Michael Crichton (1997). “The Lost World”, Knopf

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For some reason, we are truly convinced that if we criticize ourselves, the criticism will lead to change. If we are harsh, we believe we will end up being kind. If we shame ourselves, we believe we end up loving ourselves. It has never been true, not for a moment, that shame leads to love. Only love leads to love.

Geneen Roth

Love, Inspirational, Change

FaceBook post by Geneen Roth from Apr 24, 2014

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How do you untell something? You can't. You can't put words back in your mouth. What you can do, is spread false gossip ... so people think that everything that's been said is untrue. Include that Stanley is having an affair. It's like the end of Spartacus. I have seen the movie half a dozen times, and I still don't know who the real Spartacus is. And, that is what makes that movie a classic whodunnit.

Michael Scott

Real, Thinking, Gossip

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Any concept of biology is not only sterile and profitless, it is distorted and untrue, if it puts its primary focus on unnatural conditions rather than on those vast forces not of man's making that shape and channel the nature and direction of life.

Rachel Carson

Men, Focus, Shapes

Preface to "Humane Biology Projects" by the Animal Welfare Institute, 1961.

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The most useful piece of learning for the uses of life is to unlearn what is untrue.

Antisthenes

Life, Wisdom, Truth

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A lie cannot live.

Martin Luther King, Jr.

Liars, Lying, Deception

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People forget that stereotypes aren’t bad because they are always untrue. Stereotypes are bad because they are not always true. If we allow ourselves to judge another based on a stereotype, we have allowed a gross generalization to replace our own thinking.

George Takei

Thinking, People, Judging

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We can't believe what we believe to be untrue, and we can't love what we believe to be unreal.

Peter Kreeft

Inspirational, Believe, Belief

Peter Kreeft, Fr. Ronald Tacelli (2016). “Handbook of Catholic Apologetics: Reasoned Answers to Questions of Faith”, p.18, Ignatius Press

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When men no longer have the least fear of saying something untrue, they very soon have no fear whatsoever of doing something unjust.

Theodor Haecker

Men, Unjust, No Fear

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It is simply untrue that all our institutions are evil,... that all politicians are mere opportunists, that all aspects of university life are corrupt. Having discovered an illness, it's not terribly useful to prescribe death as a cure.

George McGovern

Death, Evil, Dying

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When you're young you think that you're going to sail into a lovely lake of quietude and peace. This is profoundly untrue.

Doris Lessing

Thinking, Lakes, Lovely

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Do not take the yardstick of your ignorance to measure what the ancients knew, and call everything which you do not know lies. Do not call things untrue because they are marvelous, but give them a fair consideration.

Wendell Phillips

Lying, Ignorance, Giving

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In my first publication I might have claimed that I had come to the conclusion, as a result of serious study of the literature and deep thought, that valuable antibacterial substances were made by moulds and that I set out to investigate the problem. That would have been untrue and I preferred to tell the truth that penicillin started as a chance observation. My only merit is that I did not neglect the observation and that I pursued the subject as a bacteriologist. My publication in 1929 was the starting-point of the work of others who developed penicillin especially in the chemical field.

Alexander Fleming

Science, Discovery, Deep Thought

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Together they [President Nixon and Secretary Kissinger] pursued ends that frequently had a tenuous link with reality, using means that were not merely disproportionate but counterproductive and untrue to those values they were meant to defend. In fact neither man demonstrated much faith in those values.

William Shawcross

Mean, Reality, Men

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People forget that unauthorized does not mean untrue and authorized does not mean authentic.

Kitty Kelley

Mean, People, Doe

"Unauthorized, But Not Untrue" by Kitty Kelley, www.huffingtonpost.com. December 6, 2010.

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But it is also untrue that I have nothing specific in mind. As with my landscapes: I see countless landscapes, photograph barely 1 in 100,000, and paint barely 1 in 100 of those that I photograph. I am therefore seeking something quite specific; from this I conclude that I know what I want.

Gerhard Richter

Art, Mind, Landscape

FaceBook post by Gerhard Richter from Mar 19, 2015

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It's always written that my father was a rich, conservative John Bircher. That is untrue. He was not rich. He was not a John Bircher.

Nancy Reagan

Father, Conservative, Rich

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Lipstick on your collar said you were untrue. Bet your bottom dollar, you and I are through.

Connie Francis

Dollars, Said, Collars

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One hears a lot of talk about the hostility between scientists and engineers. I don't believe in any such thing. In fact I am quite certain it is untrue... There cannot possibly be anything in it because neither side has anything to do with the other.

David Hilbert

Believe, Science, Facts

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Now, since our condition accommodates things to itself, and transforms them according to itself, we no longer know things in their reality; for nothing comes to us that is not altered and falsified by our Senses. When the compass, the square, and the rule are untrue, all the calculations drawn from them, all the buildings erected by their measure, are of necessity also defective and out of plumb. The uncertainty of our senses renders uncertain everything that they produce.

Michel de Montaigne

Philosophy, Reality, Squares

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Emotions can certainly be misleading: they can fool you into believing stuff that is definitely, demonstrably untrue.

Francis Spufford

Believe, Stuff, Fool

Francis Spufford (2012). “Unapologetic: Why, despite everything, Christianity can still make surprising emotional sense”, p.19, Faber & Faber

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One might point to the great illumination that has resulted from Freud's analysis of the abracadabra of our dreams. No one can any longer dismiss the fantasy because it is logically inconsistent, superficially absurd, or objectively untrue.

Walter Lippmann

Dream, Illumination, Might

Walter Lippmann (1914). “A Preface to Politics”

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The art of politics, under democracy, is simply the art of ringing it. Two branches reveal themselves. There is the art of the demagogue, and there is the art of what may be called, by a shot-gun marriage of Latin and Greek, the demaslave. They are complementary, and both of them are degrading to their practitioners. The demagogue is one who preaches doctrines he knows to be untrue to men he knows to be idiots. The demaslave is one who listens to what these idiots have to say and then pretends that he believes it himself.

H. L. Mencken

Art, Latin, Believe

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I believe politicians should aim to be accurate and truthful in what they say at all times. You can be truthful and inaccurate but what you shouldn't be doing at any time is saying things that are untrue or making commitments that you have no intention of honouring.

Malcolm Turnbull

Believe, Commitment, Truthful

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Bush told me, he doesn't watch TV ... though it's untrue that he doesn't read the newspapers.

Robert Draper

Watches, Tvs, Newspapers

"Books: 'Dead Certain: The Presidency of George W. Bush'". Live Q&A, www.washingtonpost.com. September 11, 2007.

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