Untrue Quotes - Page 6

• We never fully grasp the import of any true statement until we have a clear notion of what the opposite untrue statement would be.

  William James

  Truth, Opposites, Would Be

  William James (2007). “The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy”, p.217, Cosimo, Inc.

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• The speed of communications is wondrous to behold. It is also true that speed can multiply the distribution of information that we know to be untrue.

  Edward R. Murrow

  Truth, Communication, Literature

  On receiving the "Family of Man" Award from the Protestant Council of the City of New York, October 28, 1964.

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• I think it is quite untrue that it is standard journalistic practice to name the interviewer when quoting from an interview.

  Fareed Zakaria

  Thinking, Practice, Names

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• We are all capable of believing things which we know to be untrue, and then, when we are finally proved wrong, impudently twisting the facts so as to show that we were right.

  George Orwell

  Believe, Facts, Shows

  After World War II; quoted in the London Financial Times, 13 May 2003.

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• Gandalf! I thought you were dead! But then I thought I was dead myself. Is everything sad going to come untrue? What's happened to the world?" A great Shadow has departed," said Gandalf, and then he laughed and the sound was like music, or like water in a parched land; and as he listened the thought came to Sam that he had not heard laughter, the pure sound of merriment, for days upon days without count.

  J. R. R. Tolkien

  Laughter, Land, Water

  J.R.R. Tolkien (2012). “The Lord of the Rings: One Volume”, p.640, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• If my theory of relativity is proven successful, Germany will claim me as a German and France will declare me a citizen of the world. Should my theory prove untrue, France will say that I am a German, and Germany will declare that I am a Jew.

  Albert Einstein

  Inspirational, Spiritual, Successful

  Address to French Philosophical Society, Paris, 6 Apr. 1922

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• For men, as a rule, love is but an episode which takes place among the other affairs of the day, and the emphasis laid on it in novels gives it an importance which is untrue to life. There are few men to whom it is the most important thing in the world, and they are not the very interesting ones; even women, with whom the subject is of paramount interest, have a contempt for them.

  W. Somerset Maugham

  Love Is, Men, Interesting

  W. Somerset Maugham (1919). “The Moon and Sixpence”

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• They loved, and quarreled, and made up, and loved, and fought, and were true to each other and untrue. She made him the happiest man in the whole world and the most wretched, and after a few years she died, and then, when he was thirty, he died, too. But by that time Catullus had invented the love poem.

  Tom Stoppard

  Men, Years, World

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• If Christianity is untrue, then no honest man will want to believe it, however helpful it might be; if it is true, every honest man will want to believe it, even if it gives him no help at all

  C. S. Lewis

  Believe, Men, Giving

  C. S. Lewis (2014). “God in the Dock”, p.109, Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing

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• In any war story, but especially a true one, it's difficult to separate what happened from what seemed to happen. What seems to happen becomes its own happening and has to be told that way. The angles of vision are skewed. When a booby trap explodes, you close your eyes and duck and float outside yourself. .. The pictures get jumbled, you tend to miss a lot. And then afterward, when you go to tell about it, there is always that surreal seemingness, which makes the story seem untrue, but which in fact represents the hard and exact truth as it seemed.

  Tim O'Brien

  War, Eye, Ducks

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• Because they claim to be concerned with the welfare of whole societies, governments arrogate to themselves the right to pass off as mere abstract profit or loss the human unhappiness that their decisions provoke or their negligence permits. It is a duty of an international citizenship to always bring the testimony of people's suffering to the eyes and ears of governments, sufferings for which it's untrue that they are not responsible. The suffering of men must never be a mere silent residue of policy. It grounds an absolute right to stand up and speak to those who hold power.

  Michel Foucault

  Eye, Loss, Men

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• It strikes me as gruesome and comical that in our culture we have an expectation that man can always solve his problems ... This is so untrue that it makes me want to cry-or laugh.

  Kurt Vonnegut

  Memorable, Men, Laughing

  Kurt Vonnegut (1988). “Conversations with Kurt Vonnegut”, p.91, Univ. Press of Mississippi

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• Bush is good at stating the obviously untrue.

  Eleanor Clift

  Unfaithful, Stating The Obvious

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• When I go stand up at the podium in front of the White House press corps, I never lie. I never say something that I know is untrue. Credibility is enormously important to a press secretary.

  Jay Carney

  Lying, White, House

  "Carney: 'I never lie'" by Jennifer Epstein, www.politico.com. April 27, 2012.

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• People settle for so much less because they find their identities in the world's fickle and untrue opinions. God made you royal with His blood. Live.

  Lacey Mosley

  Self Esteem, Blood, People

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• Art is a reality, not a definition; inasmuch as it approaches a reality, it approaches perfection, and inasmuch as it approaches a mere definition, it is imperfect and untrue.

  Benjamin Haydon

  Art, Reality, Perfection

  Benjamin Robert Haydon, Frederick Wordsworth Haydon (1876). “Correspondence and Table-talk: With a Memoir”, p.255

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• There's this illusion that homosexuals have sex and heterosexuals fall in love. That's completely untrue. Everybody wants to be loved.

  Boy George

  Falling In Love, Sex, Gay

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• I ask but one thing of you, only one, That always you will be my dream of you; That never shall I wake to find untrue All this I have believed and rested on, Forever vanished, like a vision gone Out into the night. Alas, how few There are who strike in us a chord we knew Existed, but so seldom heard its tone We tremble at the half-forgotten sound. The world is full of rude awakenings And heaven-born castles shattered to the ground, Yet still our human longing vainly clings To a belief in beauty through all wrongs. O stay your hand, and leave my heart its songs!

  Amy Lowell

  Dream, Song, Heart

  Amy Lowell (2009). “A Dome of Many-Coloured Glass”, p.70, ReadHowYouWant.com

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• The ingrained idea that, because there is no king and they despise titles, the Americans are a free people is pathetically untrue. . . . There is a perpetual interference with personal liberty over there that would not be tolerated in England for a week.

  Margot Asquith

  Kings, Ideas, People

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• It is quite untrue that British people don't appreciate music. They may not understand it but they absolutely love the noise it makes.

  Thomas Beecham

  Sarcastic, Sarcasm, People

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• Every life is its own excuse for being, and to deny or refute the untrue things that are said of you is an error in judgment. All wrong recoils upon the doer, and the person who makes wrong statements about others is themselves to be pitied, not the person they vilify. It is better to be lied about than to lie. At the last no one can harm us but ourselves.

  Elbert Hubbard

  Lying, Errors, Optimism

  Elbert Hubbard (1911). “A Thousand & One Epigrams: Selected from the Writings of Elbert Hubbard”

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• Despite all that good news, there's plenty of horror stories being told. All of them are untrue, but they're being told all over America.

  Harry Reid

  Horror Stories, America, News

  "Harry Reid Takes to the Senate Floor to Tell You the ‘Truth’ About All Those Obamacare ‘Horror Stories’". Harry Reid's speech on the floor of the Senate in Washington, D.C., www.theblaze.com. February 26, 2014.

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• It becomes still more difficult to find
Words at once true and kind,
Or not untrue and not unkind.

  Philip Larkin

  Kind, Difficult, Stills

  Philip Larkin (2014). “Collected Poems”, p.88, Faber & Faber

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• Anyone who clings to the historically untrue-and thoroughly immoral-doctrine that, 'violence never settles anything' I would advise to conjure the ghosts of Napoleon Bonaparte and the Duke of Wellington and let them debate it. The ghost of Hitler could referee, and the jury might well be the Dodo, the Great Auk and the Passenger Pigeon. Violence, naked force, has settled more issues in history than has any other factor, and the contrary opinion is wishful thinking at its worst. Breeds that forget this basic truth have always paid for it with their lives and freedom.

  Robert A. Heinlein

  Thinking, Issues, Never Settle

  Robert A. Heinlein (1987). “Starship Troopers”, p.27, Penguin

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• Gandalf! I thought you were dead! But then I thought I was dead myself. Is everything sad going to come untrue? What's happened to the world?

  J. R. R. Tolkien

  World, Happened

  J.R.R. Tolkien (2012). “The Return of the King: Being the Third Part of the Lord of the Rings”, p.930, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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