“War is fought in this fog of falsehood, a great deal of it undiscovered and accepted as truth. The fog arises from fear and is fed by panic. Any attempt to doubt or deny even the most fantastic story has to be condemned at once as unpatriotic, if not traitorous. This allows a free field for the rapid spread of lies.”

— Arthur Ponsonby

Falsehood in Wartime (1928), Introduction
Context: War is fought in this fog of falsehood, a great deal of it undiscovered and accepted as truth. The fog arises from fear and is fed by panic. Any attempt to doubt or deny even the most fantastic story has to be condemned at once as unpatriotic, if not traitorous. This allows a free field for the rapid spread of lies. If they were only used to deceive the enemy in the game of war it would not be worth troubling about. But, as the purpose of most of them is to fan indignation and induce the flower of the country's youth to be ready to make the supreme sacrifice, it becomes a serious matter. Exposure, therefore, may be useful, even when the struggle is over, in order to show up the fraud, hypocrisy, and humbug on which all war rests, and the blatant and vulgar devices which have been used for so long to prevent the poor ignorant people from realizing the true meaning of war.

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Arthur Ponsonby31

British Liberal and later Labour politician and pacifist 1871–1946

Stephen Spender (1909–1995) English poet and man of letters

"I Think of Those Who Were Truly Great"
Poems (1933)
Context: What is precious is never to forget
The delight of the blood drawn from ancient springs
Breaking through rocks in worlds before our earth;
Never to deny its pleasure in the simple morning light,
Nor its grave evening demand for love;
Never to allow gradually the traffic to smother
With noise and fog the flowering of the spirit.

“Our doubts are traitors,
and make us lose the good we oft might win,
by fearing to attempt.”

William Shakespeare Measure for Measure

Source: Measure for Measure

“A deep fog of obscurity is thrown about war by the use of misleading and confusing terms.”

Kirby Page (1890–1957) American clergyman

Must We Go to War? (1937)

“One can imagine having a procedural rule that anything ambiguous should be treated as the Taj Mahal unless we see that it is labelled "fog"…The motorist replies: "What sort of rule is this? Surely the best guarantee I can have that the fog is fog is if I fail to see the sign saying 'fog' because of the fog."”

Michael Frayn (1933) British writer

James Fenton (ed.) The Original Michael Frayn (Edinburgh: Salamander Press, 1983) p. 67.

“All men are stuck in a kind of fog. They're surrounded by a wall of fog. They think this is perfectly normal, but it's not.”

Colin Wilson (1931–2013) author

Source: The Black Room (1975), p. 20
Context: All men are stuck in a kind of fog. They're surrounded by a wall of fog. They think this is perfectly normal, but it's not. It means that since they can't see much beyond their own little situation, they tend to vegetate. They need some immediate stimulus to keep them alert.