Quotes about fake (1402 quotes, page 4)

“At no time did I intend to, or do I believe that I did put forward false information to the American people.”

Condoleezza Rice (1954) American Republican politician; U.S. Secretary of State; political scientist

Congressional hearing http://www.reuters.com/article/middleeastCrisis/idUSN13374647, February 13, 2008.

People , Time

“You do not believe that souls are assigned, first to one body and then to another, and that our so-called death is merely a change of abode? You do not believe that in cattle, or in wild beasts, or in creatures of the deep, the soul of him who was once a man may linger? You do not believe that nothing on this earth is annihilated, but only changes its haunts? And that animals also have cycles of progress and, so to speak, an orbit for their souls, no less than the heavenly bodies, which revolve in fixed circuits? Great men have put faith in this idea; therefore, while holding to your own view, keep the whole question in abeyance in your mind. If the theory is true, it is a mark of purity to refrain from eating flesh; if it be false, it is economy. And what harm does it do to you to give such credence? I am merely depriving you of food which sustains lions and vultures.”

Sotion (Pythagorean) ancient greek philosopher

Quoted in Seneca the Younger, Moral letters to Lucilius, CVIII, 20-21.

Death , Men , Faith , Food

“In regard to propaganda the early advocates of universal literacy and a free press envisaged only two possibilities: the propaganda might be true, or it might be false. They did not foresee what in fact has happened, above all in our Western capitalist democracies—the development of a vast mass communications industry, concerned in the main neither with the true nor the false, but with the unreal, the more or less totally irrelevant. In a word, they failed to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distraction.”

Aldous Huxley book Brave New World Revisited

Source: Brave New World Revisited (1958), Chapter 4 (pp. 35-36)

Democracy , Communication , Universe

“The pretended rights of these theorists are all extremes: and in proportion as they are metaphysically true, they are morally and politically false. The rights of men are in a sort of middle, incapable of definition, but not impossible to be discerned. The rights of men in government are their advantages; and these are often in balances between differences of good; in compromises between good and evil, and sometimes between evil and evil. Political reason is a computing principle: adding, subtracting, multiplying, and dividing, morally and not metaphysically or mathematically, true moral denominations.”

Edmund Burke book Reflections on the Revolution in France

Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790)

Men , Mathematics , Evil

“Culture has become a system of defense against technics. This defense appears as a defense of man based on the assumption that technical objects contain no human reality. We should like to show that culture fails to take into account that there is a human reality in technical reality and that, if it is to fully play its role, culture must come to incorporate technical entities into its body of knowledge and its sense of values. Recognition of the modes of existence of technical objects should be the result of philosophical thought, which in this respect has to achieve what is analogous to the role it played in the abolition of slavery and in the affirmation of the value of the human person. The opposition established between culture and technology, between man and machine, is false and is not well-founded; what underlies it is mere ignorance or resentment. Behind the mask of a facile humanism it hides a reality that is rich in human efforts and natural forces, a reality that constitutes the world of technical objects, mediators between nature and man.”

Gilbert Simondon (1924–1989) 20th century French philosopher

Source: Du mode d'existence des object technique (1958), p. 1 (http://www.academia.edu/4184556)

World , Nature , Knowledge , Reality

“The problem creationists have with evolution is not that it challenges belief in God, because it doesn’t. Their problem is that evolution, -like every other field of science- challenges the accuracy and authority of the storybooks which creationists equate to God. Consequently, they tend to reject science almost entirely, and will often take all the sciences they perceive as threatening, and lump them all together under one heading, which they then refer to as “evolution-ism”. It’s an attempt to minimize the sheer volume of sciences allied against them. This is also part of their intentionally-erected illusion of equality; a false dichotomy that if their legendary folklore isn’t the absolute authority -being both literally and completely true, then God couldn’t create or even exist any other way.”

Aron Ra (1962) Aron Ra is an atheist activist and the host of the Ra-Men Podcast

"6th Foundational Falsehood of Creationism" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t3k0dDFxkhM, Youtube (February 2, 2008)
Youtube, Foundational Falsehoods of Creationism

God , Way , Problem , Science

“Let us contradict ourselves because we change. Let us be good and evil, true and false, beautiful and loathsome. We are all of these anyway. Let us admit it by accepting movement. Let us be static! Be static!”

Jean Tinguely (1925–1991) Swiss painter and sculptor

reprinted in 'Zero', ed. Otto Piene and Heinz Mack, Cambridge, Mass; MIT Press 1973, p. 120
Quotes, 1960's, untitled statements in 'Zero 3', (1961)

Beauty , Evil , Change

“Of course it’s possible that there really ISN’T any shadow government. The whole thing could be a phony story that was fed to The Washington Post to mislead our enemies. As you recall, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld recently admitted that the Pentagon had set up an office-officially named "The Office of Disinformation"-that was supposed to put out false statements to the media, thus throwing our enemies off the track. For example, if we were getting ready to attack Iraq, officials of the Office of Disinformation would hold a press conference and state: "Well, we’re certainly not going to attack Iraq!"”

Dave Barry (1947) American writer

The news media would report this, and Iraq would relax. France, meanwhile, would surrender.
Column for week of April 15, 2002
Columns and articles

“This topic is personal for me; it’s not just academic. If someone says that the Bible is a myth and is not true, or that the doctrine of evolution is true, and the Genesis account of creation is false, they are attacking the very foundation of my faith.”

Kent Hovind (1953) American young Earth creationist

Dissertation for doctor of philosophy in christian education (May 25, 1991)

Faith , Personality

“The major obstacle and most difficult challenge in pursuit of a genuinely loving and caring relationship is to overcome the seductive powers and the addiction to the content approach to entering, creating, and maintaining it. The elusive golden thread of understanding lies in the how, and not the what. Specifically, as gender polarization in a relationship decreases, the experience of it improves. Without that rebalancing, even the most perfect content will unravel increasingly. Once the process is balanced, the magic of having ideal content is no longer necessary. The rebalancing process which creates a relationship free of polarizing gender defenses is clearly difficult and threatening initially in the same way that giving up an addiction seems to be. Once achieved however, a relationship free of distortion, false illusions, resentment, and hopelessness truly becomes possible.”

Herb Goldberg (1937–2019) American psychologist

What Men Still Don't Know About Transforming Their Relationships, pp. 194–198
What Men Still Don't Know About Women, Relationships, and Love (2007)

Love , Way , Understanding , Perfection

“This book can be read as an argument that social democracy is not enough and we can establish something better than social democracy. The explanatory ideas of False Necessity provide an understanding of society that presents the institutional arrangements on which the social democrat relies as the relatively contingent and revisable outcome of a particular sequence of practical and imaginative conflicts. More generally, these explanatory arguments support a view of social reality within which the rejection of social democracy seems reasonable. The programmatic ideas propose an alternative to social democracy that realizes more fully the ideals that the social democrat can only imperfectly achieve and radically redefines these ideals in the course of realizing them.”

Roberto Mangabeira Unger (1947) Brazilian philosopher and politician

Source: False Necessityː Anti-Necessitarian Social Theory in the Service of Radical Democracy (1987), p. 26

Books , Democracy , Imagination , Idea

“Comprehension is neither an arbitrary act nor a passive experience, but a responsible act claiming universal validity. Such knowing is indeed objective in the sense of establishing contact with a hidden reality; a contact that is defined as the condition for anticipating an indeterminate range of yet unknown (and perhaps yet inconceivable) true implications. It seems reasonable to describe this fusion of the personal and the objective as Personal Knowledge. Personal knowledge is an intellectual commitment, and as such inherently hazardous. Only affirmations that could be false can be said to convey objective knowledge of this kind.”

Michael Polanyi (1891–1976) Hungarian-British polymath

Source: Personal Knowledge (1958), p. vii-viii

Knowledge , Reality , Sense , Universe

“We would most gladly ye came yourself if that ye may, and if ye may not, we pray you not to fail, but to accomplish in all diligence our said commandment, to send our Seal incontinent upon the sight hereof, as we trust you, with such as ye trust and the Officers pertaining to attend with it; praying you to ascertain us of your News. Here, loved be God, is all well and truly determined, and for to resist the Malice of him that had best Cause to be true, the Duke of Buckingham, the most untrue creature living; whom with God’s Grace we shall not be long till that we will be in those parts, and subdue his Malice. We assure you there was never false traitor better purveyed for, as this bearer Gloucester shall show you.”

Richard III of England (1452–1485) English monarch

Postscript from a letter to his Chancellor, 12 October, 1483. Reprinted in Richard the Third (1956) http://books.google.com/books?id=dNm0JgAACAAJ&dq=Paul+Murray+Kendall+Richard+the+Third&ei=TZHDR8zXKZKIiQHf2NCpCA

Love , God , Parting

“Unfortunately, people in office develop a rigidity or a false sense of prestige that the Government should not yield to pressure. I was no exception to it during my earlier career in charge of vital departments. Wisdom dawns when it is too late or the situation is beyond redemption.”

R. Venkataraman (1910–2009) seventh Vice-President of India and the 8th President of India

Source: Commissions and Omissions by Indian Presidents and Their Conflicts with the Prime Ministers Under the Constitution: 1977-2001, p. 161-62.

Wisdom , People , Sense

“A small beginning has led us to a great ending. If I were to put the bit of chalk with which we started into the hot but obscure flame of burning hydrogen, it would presently shine like the sun. It seems to me that this physical metamorphosis is no false image of what has been the result of our subjecting it to a jet of fervent, though nowise brilliant, thought to-night. It has become luminous, and its clear rays, penetrating the abyss of the remote past, have brought within our ken some stages of the evolution of the earth. And in the shifting "without haste, but without rest" of the land and sea, as in the endless variation of the forms assumed by living beings, we have observed nothing but the natural product of the forces originally possessed by the substance of the universe.”

Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–1895) English biologist and comparative anatomist

1860s, On a Piece of Chalk (1868)

Nature , Universe , Sun , Past

“Man's excellence lies in his readiness to let others live and lay down his own life. As he progresses, his food also changes for the better. He has the capacity to grow still further. There have been many more discoveries after Darwin's. The book which you have been reading seems to be an old one. Whether it is old or new, the "Principle of the greatest good of the greatest number," or "survival of the fittest" is false.”

Mahatma Gandhi (1869–1948) pre-eminent leader of Indian nationalism during British-ruled India

In his Letter to Premabehn Kantak, in Collected Works, , Delhi. Ministry of Information (1969-94)., 50:309-10
1930s

Life , Books , Food , Change

“Precision of communication is important, more important than ever, in our era of hair trigger balances, when a false or misunderstood word may create as much disaster as a sudden thoughtless act.”

James Thurber (1894–1961) American cartoonist, author, journalist, playwright

Lanterns and Lances‎ (1961), p. 44
From Lanterns and Lances‎

Communication

“The spirit of our National Socialist idea has to overpower the spirit of liberalism and false democracy if there is to be a third Reich at all! Deeply rooted in organic life, we have realized that the false belief in the equality of man is the deadly threat with which liberalism destroys people and nation, culture and morals. violating the deepest levels of our being! We have to reject with fanatical zeal the frequent lie that people are basically equal and equal in regard to their influence in the state and their share of power! People are unequal, they are unequal from birth, become more unequal in life and are therefore to be valued unequally in their positions in society and in the state!”

Gregor Strasser (1892–1934) German politician, rival of Adolf Hitler inside the Nazi Psrty

Source: " Thoughts about the Tasks of the Future https://books.google.com/books?id=fG_oAAAAIAAJ&pg=PA87", by Gregor Strasser - (1926 June 15)

Life , People , Lie , Democracy

“To say he hath spoken to him in a Dream, is no more then to say he dreamed that God spake to him; which is not of force to win beleef from any man, that knows dreams are for the most part naturall, and may proceed from former thoughts; and such dreams as that, from selfe conceit, and foolish arrogance, and false opinion of a mans own goodlinesse, or other vertue, by which he thinks he hath merited the favour of extraordinary Revelation. To say he hath seen a Vision, or heard a Voice, is to say, that he dreamed between sleeping and waking: for in such manner a man doth many times naturally take his dream for a vision, as not having well observed his own slumbering. To say he speaks by supernaturall Inspiration, is to say he finds an ardent desire to speak, or some strong opinion of himself, for which hee can alledge no naturall and sufficient reason. So that though God Almighty can speak to a man, by Dreams, Visions, Voice, and Inspiration; yet he obliges no man to beleeve he hath so done to him that pretends it; who (being a man) may erre, and (which is more) may lie.”

Thomas Hobbes book Leviathan

The Third Part, Chapter 32
Leviathan (1651)

God , Lie , Dreams , Nature

“We see that all the enthusiasts about becoming a false Mahdi have gone upside down. That means striving for it would not make it happen, being an enthusiast would not make it happen: God is the One Who creates that person as the Mahdi.”

Harun Yahya (1956) Turkish author

4 January 2014.
A9 TV addresses, 2014

God , Personality

“I like the description 'Physical art'. I think maybe art emerged when man first began to distinguish himself from nature. Art is part of himself, which he returns perhaps as an homage to the nature which he left. Of course, he never left nature. The rise of consciousness, perhaps... The main thing we believe, that separated us from not only animals but from the stones, is the fact that we are not stones, that we are not dogs. Now that is an assumption, perhaps it's a false assumption. But anyway, somehow I think one of the greatest functions of art is that man can feed back to his own consciousness through the knowledge that he is not a stone or not a dog.”

Carl Andre (1935) American artist

December 1969; quote from a talk with his audience
Source: Artists talks 1969 – 1977, p. 12

Dogs , Art , Quotes , Nature

“This book is a long conference of God, the angels, and Mahomet, which that false prophet very grossly invented; sometimes he introduceth God, who speaketh to him, and teacheth him his law, then an angel, among the prophets, and frequently maketh God to speak in the plural. … Thou wilt wonder that such absurdities have infected the best part of the world, and wilt avouch, that the knowledge of what is contained in this book, will render that law contemptible …”

John Adams (1735–1826) 2nd President of the United States

John Adams: John Adams Library (Boston Public Library) BRL; Du Ryer, André, ca. 1580-ca. 1660, tr; Adams, John, 1735-1826, former owner, "[ 2013-05-01 http://ia700200.us.archive.org/4/items/korancommonlycal00john/korancommonlycal00john.pdf, The Koran : commonly called the Alcoran of Mahomet (1806)]," Springfield [Mass.] : Printed by Henry Brewer, for Isaiah Thomas, Jun.
1770s

God , Books , World , Law

“I am almost amazed that you consider a professional philosopher capable of no confusion in concepts and definitions. Such things are nowhere more at home than among philosophers who are not mathematicians, and Wolff was no mathematician, even though he made cheap compen- diums. Look around among the philosophers of today, among Schelling, Hegel, Nees von Esenbeck, and their like; doesn t your hair stand on end at their definitions? Read in the history of ancient philosophy what kinds of definitions the men of that day, Plato and others, gave (I except Aristotle). But even in Kant it is often not much better; in my opinion his distinction between analytic and synthetic theorems is such a one that either peters out in a triviality or is false.”

Carl Friedrich Gauss (1777–1855) German mathematician and physical scientist

As quoted in Carl Friedrich Gauss: Titan of Science (1955) by Guy Waldo Dunnington. p. 362

Men , Home , History , Reading

“Nothing could be a more serious violation of public trust than to consciously make a war based on false claims.”

Wesley Clark (1944) American general and former Democratic Party presidential candidate

Conference of Military Reporters and Editors (October 2003)

War

“The Quran urges people who feel vulnerable before oppressors to rid themselves of the influence of the bluffing and false appearances of these oppressors and to compare themselves realistically to the latter in order to realize that they have no hidden or different power that normal people do not have.”

Mohammad Hussein Fadlallah (1935–2010) Lebanese faqih

The Quran calls on the weak and oppressed to gain strength http://english.bayynat.org/TheHolyQuran/Quran_QuranCalls.htm

People , Feeling , Appearance

“In this century the writer has carried on a conversation with madness. We might almost say of the twentieth-century writer that he aspires to madness. Some have made it, of course, and they hold special places in our regard. To a writer, madness is a final distillation of self, a final editing down. It's the drowning out of false voices.”

Don DeLillo book The Names

Source: The Names (1982), Ch. 5

Madness

“How great hath been the number of those who have falsely laid claim to a cause within Islám, and ye followed in their footsteps without having witnessed a single proof. What evidence can ye then produce in the presence of your Lord, if ye do but meditate a while?
Take ye good heed in your night lest ye be a cause of sadness to any soul, whether ye be able to discover proofs in him or not, that haply on the Day of Resurrection ye may not grieve Him within Whose grasp lieth every proof. And when ye do not discern God’s testimony in a person, he will verily fail in manifesting the power of Truth; and God is sufficient to deal with him. Indeed on no account should ye sadden any person; surely God will put him to the proof and bring him to account. It behooveth you to cling to the testimony of your own Faith and to observe the ordinances laid down in the Bayán.”

Báb (1819–1850) Iranian prophet; founder of the religion Bábism; venerated in the Bahá'í Faith

XVIII, 3
The Kitáb-I-Asmá

God , Truth , Sadness , Faith

“Once people accepted the false notion that the earth was older than 6,000-years, regardless of how they justified it with the plain teachings of Scripture, the door was open for acceptance of the evolution theory, which became popular in 1859 after Darwin published his book, “On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, of the Preservation of Favored Races in the Struggle for Life.” It’s been downhill ever since!”

Kent Hovind (1953) American young Earth creationist

Source: What On Earth Is About To Happen… For Heaven’s Sake? (2013), pp. 34-35

Life , People , Books , Nature

“Besides the fact of the Christians rejecting all the heathen ceremonies, we must not forget that they plainly maintained that all the heathen religions were false. The Christians thus declared war against the heathen rites, and it is hardly necessary to observe that this was a declaration of hostility against the Roman government, which tolerated all the various forms of superstition that existed in the empire, and could not consistently tolerate another religion, which declared that all the rest were false and all the splendid ceremonies of the empire only a worship of devils.”

George Long (1800–1879) English classical scholar

M. Aurelius Antoninus

Hostility , War , Religion , Forgetting

“Zeal is that pure and heavenly flame,
The fire of love supplies;
While that which often bears the name,
Is self in a disguise. True zeal is merciful and mild,
Can pity and forbear;
The false is headstrong, fierce and wild,
And breathes revenge and war.”

John Newton Olney Hymns

Hymn 70: True and False Zeal
Olney Hymns (1779)

Love , War , Revenge

“Marx, although a man of broad knowledge, had one blind spot: he was ignorant of the true character of economics. He did not realize that economics can only be understood in close relationship to the other humanities (and certain sciences), and therefore should not be studied in vacuo. Ironically, this very weakness was largely instrumental in making Marxism successful. Marxist economics—yet another instance of a false but clear idea—can be explained to the merest child in a matter of minutes. (Conversely, to explain the workings of the free market economy to an adult would take weeks of hard work.) Because it was easily grasped, Marxism flooded the world within a few decades, as had other simplistic ideologies and religions, such as Islam and the Enlightenment; this same sort of simplicity gave rise to the French Revolution and national socialism. Christianity, on the other hand, took three centuries to triumph.”

Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn (1909–1999) Austrian noble and political theorist

Source: Leftism Revisited (1990), p. 337

World , Religion , Idea , Knowledge

“According to a stagist conception of progressive history (which is usually blind to its implicit teleology), the work of figures like Foucault, Derrida and other cutting-edge French theorists is often intuitively affiliated with a form of profound and sophisticated critique that presumably far surpasses anything found in the socialist, Marxist or anarchist traditions. It is certainly true and merits emphasis that the Anglophone reception of French theory, as John McCumber has aptly pointed out, had important political implications as a pole of resistance to the false political neutrality, the safe technicalities of logic and language, or the direct ideological conformism operative in the McCarthy-supported traditions of Anglo-American philosophy. However, the theoretical practices of figures who turned their back on what Cornelius Castoriadis called the tradition of radical critique—meaning anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist resistance—surely contributed to the ideological drift away from transformative politics. According to the spy agency itself, post-Marxist French theory directly contributed to the CIA’s cultural program of coaxing the left toward the right, while discrediting anti-imperialism and anti-capitalism, thereby creating an intellectual environment in which their imperial projects could be pursued unhindered by serious critical scrutiny from the intelligentsia.”

Gabriel Rockhill (1972) philosopher

"The CIA reads French Theory: On the Intellectual Labor of Dismantling the Cultural Left" (2017)

History , Support

“Love is a false synonym for propagation, as the soul is a wish fulfillment creation growing out of self-preservation.”

Henry Kuttner (1915–1958) American author

The Devil You Know (originally published in Unknown Fantasy Fiction, August 1941), p. 67
Short fiction, No Boundaries (1955)

Love , Soul

“There are some things that you know to be true, and others that you know to be false; yet, despite this extensive knowledge that you have, there remain many things whose truth or falsity is not known to you. We say that you are uncertain about them. You are uncertain, to varying degrees, about everything in the future; much of the past is hidden from you; and there is a lot of the present about which you do not have full information. Uncertainty is everywhere and you cannot escape from it.”

Dennis Lindley (1923–2013) British statistician

Preface. p. xi.
Understanding Uncertainty (2006)

Truth , Knowledge , Past , Future

“Exposing the children to multiple views (except those of Christians) and training them to supposedly be open-minded so that they can decide for themselves seem to be a common theme these days. As Christians, however, we are to “train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not depart from it” (Proverbs 22:6). We must give our children a strong biblical foundation of truth and equip them with answers. Yes, we can show them the other views out there in the world, but we also must show them why they are false and why God’s Word is true. We need to teach them clearly the difference between truth and error—between good and evil. We are not doing our duty as Christians if we are not striving to train them up in the fear of the Lord”

Ken Ham (1951) Australian young Earth creationist

Psalm 34:11
"Church-Sponsored Evolution Camp" http://blogs.answersingenesis.org/blogs/ken-ham/2014/07/13/church-sponsored-evolution-camp/, Around the World with Ken Ham (July 13, 2014)
Around the World with Ken Ham (May 2005 - Ongoing)

God , Children , Truth , World

“Till 2007 I have responded to everyone to all questions asked. You can read it in print media, electronic media. Yes, in 2007 when UPA again tried to take all legal routes to drag me to court then I stopped talking as I didn't want it to influence the issue because of Supreme Court ruling. Has any [other] CM been grilled for 9 hours? SC has seen the tape as it ordered the questioning. I have been through all those hurdles and I am ready for it. Modi won't surrender to such false political intentions.”

Narendra Modi (1950) Prime Minister of India

2014, "GhoshanaPatra with Narendra Modi", 2014

Question , Reading

“We know, since the theory of relativity at least, that empirical sciences are to some degree free in defining dynamical concepts or even in assuming laws, and that only a system as a whole which includes concepts, coordinating definitions, and laws can be said to be either true or false, to be adequate or inadequate to empirical facts. This "freedom," however, is a somewhat doubtful gift. The manifold of possibilities implies uncertainty, and such uncertainty can become rather painful in a science as young as psychology, where nearly all concepts are open and unsettled. As psychology approaches the state of a logically sound science, definitions cease to be an arbitrary matter. They become far-reaching decisions which presuppose the mastering of the conceptual problems but which have to be guided entirely by the objective facts.”

Kurt Lewin (1890–1947) German-American psychologist

Source: 1930s, Principles of topological psychology, 1936, p. viii.

Pain , Law , Problem , Decision

“My book or some other book said the judge. What is to be deviates no jot from the book wherein it's writ. How could it? It would be a false book and a false book is no book at all.”

Cormac McCarthy book Blood Meridian

Blood Meridian (1985)

Books

“I confidently trust that the American people will prove themselves … too wise not to detect the false pride or the dangerous ambitions or the selfish schemes which so often hide themselves under that deceptive cry of mock patriotism: "Our country, right or wrong!" They will not fail to recognize that our dignity, our free institutions and the peace and welfare of this and coming generations of Americans will be secure only as we cling to the watchword of true patriotism: "Our country — when right to be kept right; when wrong to be put right."”

Carl Schurz (1829–1906) Union Army general, politician

Speech expanding upon his famous statement in the Senate many years before, at the Anti-Imperialistic Conference, Chicago, Illinois (17 October 1899)

People , Peace , Confidence , Cry

“A good face, they say, is a letter of recommendation. O Nature, Nature, why art thou so dishonest, as ever to send men with these false recommendations into the World?”

Henry Fielding book Amelia

Book IX, ch. 5
Amelia (1751)

Men , World , Art , Nature

“This changed attitude toward slavery was, however, part of a changed attitude toward morality in general that was sweeping over Western civilization. This change was marked by the apotheosis of "change" itself. What had heretofore been regarded as moral absolutes came to be regarded as merely relative to a particular time and place—to History or Progress—with no enduring claim upon our consciences. Lincoln praised Jefferson for embodying in the Declaration "an abstract truth applicable to all men and all times." But the idea of such truth, and of the correlation of such truth with justice, was increasingly repudiated by the most educated and influential minds in the Western world. Representative of this triumph of historicism and moral relativism was historian Carl Becker's assertion in a landmark 20th-century work that "To ask whether the natural rights philosophy of the Declaration of Independence is true or false is essentially a meaningless question."”

Harry V. Jaffa (1918–2015) American historian and collegiate professor

2000s, God Bless America (2008), Slavery and the American Cause

Men , Truth , World , Education

“The greatest scandal of the century in American psychiatry … is the growing mania among thousands of inept therapists, family counselors, and social workers for arousing false memories of childhoood sexual abuse.”

Martin Gardner (1914–2010) recreational mathematician and philosopher

Notes of a Fringe-Watcher, "The Tragedies of False Memories" Skeptical Inquirer (Fall 1994) http://www.skepticfiles.org/false/mgfmsasc.htm

Family , Memory

“The belief that women are discriminated against in the workplace reinforces a couple's tendency to have the woman stay at home. It is the tendency for women to stay at home that makes the workplace value her less. then, shortly after she is married, it begins to make sense for her to move for her husband's career, not for her husband to move for her career. Conversely, it makes sense for them to invest in his medical, law, or engineering degree--rather than hers… ironically, then, a reality has been created from a false reality. And, ironically, women's careers are hurt via comments meant to prod a society into helping women's careers. The road to hell is paved…”

Warren Farrell (1943) author, spokesperson, expert witness, political candidate

Source: Why Men Earn More (2005), p. 145.

Women , Law , Home , Hell

“Nothing human's not a broth of false and true.”

Frederick Buechner book Godric

Godric (1980)

“The origin of all science is in the desire to know causes; and the origin of all false science and imposture is in the desire to accept false causes rather than none; or, which is the same thing, in the unwillingness to acknowledge our own ignorance.”

William Hazlitt (1778–1830) English writer

Burke and the Edinburgh Phrenologists in The Atlas (15 February 1829); reprinted in New Writings by William Hazlitt, William Hazlitt and Percival Presland Howe (ed.), (2nd edition, 1925), p. 117; also reprinted in The Complete Works of William Hazlitt, Volume 20: Miscellaneous writings, (J.M. Dent and Sons, 1934), (AMS Press, 1967), p. 201

Science

“What is falsely called Free Society, is a very recent invention. It purposes to make the weak, ignorant and poor, free, by turning them loose in a world owned exclusively by the few.”

George Fitzhugh (1806–1881) American activist

Source: Cannibals All!, or Slaves Without Masters (1857), p. 108

World

“Sooner or later, false thinking brings wrong conduct.”

Julian Huxley (1887–1975) English biologist, philosopher, author

"Religion and Science: Old Wine in New Bottles" in the Traveller's Library (1933) edited by William Somerset Maugham. p. 1248

Thinking

“In tragic life, God wot,
No villain need be! Passions spin the plot:
We are betrayed by what is false within.”

George Meredith (1828–1909) British novelist and poet of the Victorian era

St. 43.
Modern Love http://www.ev90481.dial.pipex.com/Meredith/modern_love.htm (1862)

Life , God , Passion

“I have no faith in our hypocritical, false, hysterical, uneducated and lazy intelligentsia when they suffer and complain: their oppression comes from within. I believe in individual people. I see salvation in discrete individuals, intellectuals and peasants, strewn hither and yon throughout Russia. They have the strength, although there are few of them.”

Anton Chekhov (1860–1904) Russian dramatist, author and physician

Letter to I.I. Orlov (February 22, 1899)
Letters

People , Faith , Suffering

“People embrace false magical theories in the hope something good will come out of them. In the most extreme of these, good comes out of them only at the end of this life, in paradise.”

Subhash Kak (1947) Indian computer scientist

The Prajna Sutra (2007)

Life , People , Hope

“Worse than any heathen or pagan abroad are those in our midst who are false to our institutions.”

Charles Sumner (1811–1874) American abolitionist and politician

Speech https://books.google.com/books?id=HGM9AQAAMAAJ&pg=PA5172 (1870)

“The slight criticism of evolution I offer should not be taken as evidence that I do not believe in evolution; I do. Let's not blame God for everything. I also believe in Lamarckism, as it was put forward by Lamarck. (The Lamarckism presented in standard textbooks is actually Lysenkoism, a straw man set up by the opponents of Lamarckism, palpably false and easily disproved.) There is no paradox in that: Lamarckism and Darwinism are not mutually exclusive, except politically.”

Gene Wolfe (1931–2019) American science fiction and fantasy writer

"Sun of Helioscope", in Castle of the Otter (1982), Reprinted in Gene Wolfe, Castle of Days (1992)
Nonfiction

God

“Except for cases of pathological incapacity, one can and must communicate, and thereby contribute in a useful and easy way to the peace of others and oneself, because silence, the absence of signals, is itself a signal, but an ambiguous one, and ambiguity generates anxiety and suspicion. To say that it is impossible to communicate is false; one always can.”

Primo Levi book The Drowned and the Saved

The Drowned and the Saved (1986)

Peace , Way , Communication , Silence

“Let us take a patriot, where we can meet him; and, that we may not flatter ourselves by false appearances, distinguish those marks which are certain, from those which may deceive; for a man may have the external appearance of a patriot, without the constituent qualities; as false coins have often lustre, though they want weight.”

Samuel Johnson (1709–1784) English writer

The Patriot (1774)

Appearance

“The IPCC WG1 Chapter 3 Report clearly cherrypicked information on the robustness of the land near-surface air temperature to bolster their advocacy of a particular perspective on the role of humans within the climate system. As a result, policymakers and the public have been given a false (or at best an incomplete) assessment of the multi-decadal global average near-surface air temperature trends.”

Roger A. Pielke (1946) American meteorologist

"Documentation of IPCC WG1 Bias by Roger A. Pielke Sr. and Dallas Staley - Part I," Climate Science: Roger Pielke Sr. Research Group Weblog (2007-06-20) http://climatesci.org/2007/06/20/documentation-of-ipcc-wg1-bias-by-roger-a-pielke-sr-and-dallas-staley-part-i/

“The doctrine of false position has been but little studied in the United States. In France it is understood perfectly. There everything is solved by false position, just as chymists solve everything by attraction and repulsion, mathematicians by circles and tangents, old people by loss and gain, young people by love and courtship.”

Alexander Bryan Johnson (1786–1867) United States philosopher and banker

The Philosophical Emperor, a Political Experiment, or, The Progress of a False Position: (1841)

Love , People , Study , Loss

“The traitor to humanity is the traitor most accursed;
Man is more than Constitutions; better rot beneath the sod,
Than to be true to Church and State while we are doubly false to God!”

James Russell Lowell (1819–1891) American poet, critic, editor, and diplomat

"On the Capture of Certain Fugitive Slaves Near Washington" (1845)

God

“If, doubting God's words, you believe this Grant to be false, it will indeed be false. Yet, if you truly believe that you have received this Grant from the Parent and do just as God says, you will be blessed, regardless of whether there is usually good or bad in your mind. The bad will appear elsewhere. In the case of childbirth, you will be blessed with a rapid and easy delivery if you just discard doubt from your mind and follow the teachings of God. But if you harbor doubt and fear, even though there be no wrongdoing in your mind, then the wheel of fear will be set in motion and your fears will be borne out.”

Nakayama Miki (1798–1887) Founder of Tenrikyo

From Yoshikazu Nakayama's biography of Miki, My Oyasama, vol. 2, p. 40–1.
My Oyasama

God , Fear , Parent , Appearance

“Just observe what you are. What you are is the fact: the fact that you are jealous, anxious, envious, brutal, demanding, violent. That is what you are. Look at it, be aware; don’t shape it, don’t guide it, don’t deny it, don’t have opinions about it. By looking at it without condemnation, without judgement, without comparison, you observe; out of that observation, out of that awareness comes affection. Now, go still further. And you can do this in one flash. It can only be done in one flash — not first from the outside and then working further and deeper and deeper and deeper; it does not work that way, it is all done with one sweep, from the outermost to the most inward, to the innermost depth. Out of this, in this, there is attention — attention to the whistle of that train, the noise, the coughing, the way you are jerking your legs about; attention whereby you listen to what is said, you find out what is true and what is false in what is being said, and you do not set up the speaker as an authority. So this attention comes out of this extraordinarily complex existence of contradiction, misery and utter despair. And when the mind is attentive, it can then give focus, which then is quite a different thing; then it can concentrate but that concentration is not the concentration of exclusion. Then the mind can give attention to whatever it is doing, and that attention becomes much more efficient, much more vital, because you are taking everything in.”

Jiddu Krishnamurti (1895–1986) Indian spiritual philosopher

Vol. XIV, p. 301
Posthumous publications, The Collected Works

Jerk , Way , Training , Despair

“I know only that in my belief in Adolf Hitler I put all my strength at the disposal of my people. As a German soldier I could only put myself at the service of the defense against those destructive forces which had once brought Germany close to the abyss, and which today, after the collapse of the Reich, are still threatening the world. If I have made mistakes in my work through a false conception of obedience, if I carried out orders, all of which, insofar as they are alleged to be cardinal orders, were issued before my time of office, then they are part of a fate which is stronger than myself and which is carrying me along with it. I am accused here because substitutes are needed for the missing Himmler and other elements which were completely contrary to me. Whether my point of view and explanation are accepted or rejected, I ask you not to connect the fate and honor of hundreds of thousands of the living and dead of the General SS, of the Waffen-SS, and of the civil servants who, believing in their ideal, bravely defended, their Reich to the last, with your just curse against Himmler. Like myself, they believed that they were acting according to law.”

Ernst Kaltenbrunner (1903–1946) Austrian-born senior official of Nazi Germany executed for war crimes

8/31/46. Quoted in "Trial of the Major War Criminals Before the International Military Tribunal" - Page 381 - Nuremberg, Germany - 1947

Fate , People , World , Law

“The interchanges I would have — of course, most of them were positive, and most people understand the movie, but there were plenty where the guys would want to put me in a headlock, or push me around a bit, or get into a little tussle with 'that tough guy from Back To The Future, because he’s not that tough after all'. Well, I’m not that tough after all, because I’m an actor; because it’s pretend! And I think that social media, the greater intimacy, maybe — I mean, part of it is false intimacy, but part of it’s real intimacy; you can go and see things about an actor, that’s kind of why I do the YouTube thing, to present, ‘this is me as a person’, that the audience, now, the pop cultural audience, is a more sophisticated audience and a more multi-faceted audience.”

Thomas F. Wilson (1959) actor, writer, musician, painter, voice-over artist, stand-up comedian, and podcaster

How Back To The Future's Thomas F Wilson Overcame His Biggest Bully: Himself http://themusic.com.au/interviews/all/2017/06/15/thomas-f-wilson-supanova-comic-con-mitch-knox/ (June 15, 2017)

People , Guy , Understanding , Thinking

“It is perilous to separate thinking rightly from acting rightly. He is already half false who speculates on truth and does not do it. Truth is given, not to be contemplated, but to be done. Life is an action — not a thought. And the penalty paid by him who speculates on truth, is that by degrees the very truth he holds becomes a falsehood.”

Frederick William Robertson (1816–1853) British writer and theologian

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 606.

Life , Truth , Penalty , Thinking

“The mess of my life, the selfishnesses and false turnings and the treacheries, all these things could fall into place, they could become a source of construction rather than a source of chaos, and precisely because I had no other choice.”

John Fowles book The Magus

Source: The Magus (1965), Ch. 27

Life , Selfishness

“It is a maxim deeply ingrafted in that dark system, that no character, however upright, is a match for constantly reiterated attacks, however false.”

Alexander Hamilton (1757–1804) Founding Father of the United States

Observations on Certain Documents http://books.google.com/books?id=Aemk203kBPoC&q="It+is+a+maxim+deeply+ingrafted+in+that+dark+system+that+No+character+however+upright+is+a+match+for+constantly+reiterated+attacks+however+false"&pg=PA377#v=onepage, also known as The Reynolds Pamphlet (1797)

“Great Negative, how vainly would the Wise
Enquire, define, distinguish, teach, devise,
Didst thou not stand to point their dull Philosophies?Is, or is not, the Two great Ends of Fate,
And, true or false, the Subject of Debate,
That perfect, or destroy, the vast Designs of Fate.”

John Wilmot, 2nd Earl of Rochester (1647–1680) English poet, and peer of the realm

Upon Nothing, ll. 28–33.
Other

Fate , Perfection

“Perhaps the heart does not deceive; never does give a false answer, except to those double-minded unhappy ones who do care about themselves, and so play tricks with it and tamper with it.”

James Anthony Froude book The Nemesis of Faith

The Nemesis of Faith (1849)

Heart

“Thou treacherous, base deserter of my flame,
False to my passion, fatal to my fame,
Through what mistaken magic dost thou prove
So true to lewdness, so untrue to love?”

John Wilmot, 2nd Earl of Rochester (1647–1680) English poet, and peer of the realm

The Imperfect Enjoyment.
Other

Love , Passion

“I had learnt from experience that many false opinions may be exchanged for true ones, without in the least altering the habits of mind of which false opinions are made.”

John Stuart Mill book Autobiography

Source: Autobiography (1873), Ch. 7: General View of the Remainder of My Life (p. 167)

“Wishful thinking gives false gods to people who hunger for gods, but those who yearn for a world with no gods are no less likely to fall victim to their own wishful thinking.”

Orson Scott Card (1951) American science fiction novelist

Homecoming saga, Earthfall (1995)

Hunger , God , People , World

“Questions at home and school should be decided in the light of the future. It is a process of toughening, but not the sort of false physical thing that we have called toughening. Our boys and girls ought to know that the bully type, the false "tough," has been the first to break down under the actual fire of battle. The quiet, the calm, the determined have made the best soldiers. Why? Obviously the bully is insecure in himself- he blusters to muster his own courage. Children ought to know that. They ought to be taught to retort to the bully, "You're a coward or you wouldn't make such a noise about being brave. The really brave man simply acts brave- he doesn't have to talk about it."”

Pearl S. Buck (1892–1973) American writer

Source: What America Means to Me (1943), p. 151-152

Children , School , Home , Girl

“false and eccentric assumption of male and female isomorphism”

Kenneth Minogue (1930–2013) Australian political theorist

How Civilizations Fall

“1. The standard neoclassical model the formal articulation of Adam Smith's invisible hand, the contention that market economies will ensure economic efficiency provides little guidance for the choice of economic systems, since once information imperfections (and the fact that markets are incomplete) are brought into the analysis, as surely they must be, there is no presumption that markets are efficient.
2. The Lange-Lerner-Taylor theorem, asserting the equivalence of market and market socialist economies, is based on a misguided view of the market, of the central problems of resource allocation, and (not surprisingly, given the first two failures) of how the market addresses those basic problems.
3. The neoclassical paradigm, through its incorrect characterization of the market economies and the central problems of resource allocation, provides a false sense of belief in the ability of market socialism to solve those resource allocation problems. To put it another way, if the neoclassical paradigm had provided a good description of the resource allocation problem and the market mechanism, then market socialism might well have been a success. The very criticisms of market socialism are themselves, to a large extent, criticisms of the neoclassical paradigm.
4. The central economic issues go beyond the traditional three questions posed at the beginning of every introductory text: What is to be produced? How is it to be produced? And for whom is it to be produced? Among the broader set of questions are: How should these resource allocation decisions be made? Who should make these decisions? How can those who are responsible for making these decisions be induced to make the right decisions? How are they to know what and how much information to acquire before making the decisions? How can the separate decisions of the millions of actors decision makers in the economy be coordinated?
5. At the core of the success of market economies are competition, markets, and decentralization. It is possible to have these, and for the government to still play a large role in the economy; indeed it may be necessary for the government to play a large role if competition is to be preserved. There has recently been extensive confusion over to what to attribute the East Asian miracle, the amazingly rapid growth in countries of this region during the past decade or two. Countries like Korea did make use of markets; they were very export oriented. And because markets played such an important role, some observers concluded that their success was convincing evidence of the power of markets alone. Yet in almost every case, government played a major role in these economies. While Wade may have put it too strongly when he entitled his book on the Taiwan success Governing the Market, there is little doubt that government intervened in the economy through the market.
6. At the core of the failure of the socialist experiment is not just the lack of property rights. Equally important were the problems arising from lack of incentives and competition, not only in the sphere of economics but also in politics. Even more important perhaps were problems of information. Hayek was right, of course, in emphasizing that the information problems facing a central planner were overwhelming. I am not sure that Hayek fully appreciated the range of information problems. If they were limited to the kinds of information problems that are at the center of the Arrow-Debreu model consumers conveying their preferences to firms, and scarcity values being communicated both to firms and consumers then market socialism would have worked. Lange would have been correct that by using prices, the socialist economy could "solve" the information problem just as well as the market could. But problems of information are broader.”

Joseph E. Stiglitz book Whither Socialism?

Source: Whither Socialism? (1994), Ch. 1 : The Theory of Socialism and the Power of Economic Ideas

Books , Way , Communication , Failure

““So it’s false.”
“What isn’t?”
“Intellectual achievement. The exercise of skill. Human feeling.””

Iain Banks Culture series

Source: Culture series, The Player of Games (1988), Chapter 1 “Culture Plate” (p. 5).

Feeling , Exercises

“No Beast is half so False as Man.”

John Ogilby (1600–1676) Scottish academic

Fab. XLIX: Of the Fox and the Cock
The Fables of Aesop (2nd ed. 1668)

“The recoil from the absolute of mechanism was into an equally sterile absolute of the organic: the raw primitive. The organic processes, reduced to shadows by the machine, made a violent effort to retrieve their position. The machine, which acerbically denied the flesh, was offset by the flesh, which denied the rational, the intelligent, the orderly processes of behavior that have entered into all man’s cultural developments—even those developments that most closely derive from the organic. The spurious notion that mechanism had naught to learn from life was supplanted by the equally false notion that life had nothing to learn from mechanism.”

Lewis Mumford book Technics and Civilization

Source: Technics and Civilization (1934), Ch. 6, sct. 9

Life , Behavior , Intelligence , Effort

“Those dreams that on the silent night intrude,
And with false flitting shapes our minds delude
… are mere productions of the brain.
And fools consult interpreters in vain.”

Jonathan Swift (1667–1745) Anglo-Irish satirist, essayist, and poet

On Dreams (1727)

Dreams , Fools , Night

“If you can't sleep with your own wife wearing a false beard, what can you do?”

John Mortimer (1923–2009) English barrister, dramatist, screenwriter and author

Source: Where There's a Will: Thoughts on the Good Life (2003), Ch. 20 : Law or Justice

Sleep

“As I looked more carefully at the listening matrix I saw that during the past twenty years we had taken a magnifying glass to the first of these four quadrants, the female experience of powerlessness. I saw I was subconsciously making a false assumption: The more deeply I understood women's experience of powerlessness, the more I assumed men had the power women did not have. In fact, what I was understanding was the female experience of male power.”

Warren Farrell (1943) author, spokesperson, expert witness, political candidate

Source: Why Men Are the Way They Are (1988), p. xx-xxi.

Women , Men , Understanding , Past

“The idol, Jwalamukhi, much worshipped by the infidels, was situated on the road to Nagarkot Some of the infidels have reported that Sultan Firoz went specially to see this idol and held a golden umbrella over it. But the author was informed by his respected father, who was in the Sultans retinue, that the infidels slandered the Sultan, who was a religious, God-fearing man, who, during the whole forty years of his reign, paid strict obedience to the law, and that such an action was impossible. The fact is, that when he went to see the idol, all the rais, ranas and zamindars who accompanied him were summoned into his presence, when he addressed them, saying, O fools and weak-minded, how can ye pray to and worship this stone, for our holy law tells us that those who oppose the decrees of our religion, will go to hell? The Sultan held the idol in the deepest detestation, but the infidels, in the blindness of their delusion, have made this false statement against him. Other infidels have said that Sultan Muhammad Shah bin Tughlik Shah held an umbrella over the same idol, but this is also a lie; and good Muhammadans should pay no heed to such statements. These two Sultans were sovereigns especially chosen by the Almighty from among the faithful, and in the whole course of their reigns, wherever they took an idol temple they broke and destroyed it; how, then, can such assertions be true? The infidels must certainly have lied!”

Firuz Shah Tughlaq (1309–1388) Tughluq sultan

Nagarkot Kangra (Himachal Pradesh) . Tarikh-i-Firuz Shahi, Elliot and Dowson, History of India as told by its own Historians, 8 Volumes, Allahabad Reprint, 1964. Elliot and Dowson. Vol. III, p. 318 ff

God , Lie , Fear , Faith

“Sir king, I have been often accused of harbouring traitorous designs against you, but, as God in heaven is just and true, may this morsel of bread choke me if even in thought I have ever been false to you.”

Godwin, Earl of Wessex Anglo-Saxon nobleman; son of Wulfnoth Cild

The Chronicle of Henry of Huntingdon (trans. Thomas Forester), Book VI
Godwin supposedly said this just before he choked to death on a piece of bread at the table of King Edward "the Confessor", but the story is very doubtful.
Misattributed

God

“These savages and their false gods! I grow weary of them. Yet they are necessary; the priests and the gods of slaves always fight on the side of the Masters. It is a rule of nature.”

Robert A. Heinlein book Sixth Column

Source: Sixth Column (1949; originally serialized in 1941), Chapter 5 (p. 62)

God , Nature , Fight

“False facts are highly injurious to the progress of science, for they often long endure; but false views, if supported by some evidence, do little harm, as every one takes a salutary pleasure in proving their falseness; and when this is done, one path towards error is closed and the road to truth is often at the same time opened.”

Charles Darwin book The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex

volume II, chapter XXI: "General Summary and Conclusion", page 385 http://darwin-online.org.uk/content/frameset?pageseq=402&itemID=F937.2&viewtype=image
The Descent of Man (1871)

Pleasure , Truth , Error , Support

“It's really dangerous for a guy to go to college these days. He's better off if he doesn't talk to any women when he gets there. The feminists are perfectly glad to make false accusations and then claim all men are capable of some dastardly deed like rape.”

Phyllis Schlafly (1924–2016) American activist

Schlafly: Hatred of Men Gave Rise to UVA Rape Story, Paul Bremmer, WND, 2014-12-10, 2014-12-15 http://www.wnd.com/2014/12/schlafly-hatred-of-men-gave-rise-to-uva-rape-story/,

Women , Men , Guy

“(referring to phone numbers stored in a database of phone and email records) Since '1' identifies anyone in the regional zone 1 of the world, that's the US, Canada and some of the islands - it's right there in the front of your white pages book … all they have to do is use that as a base of knowledge to go in to their entire database and count all of the phone numbers there that had a one in them, right-and then the ones are in the United States and then they'd have a count of how many Americans are in the database and how often each one's there. And yet they claim they can't do that, which is false. You can do the same thing with email, with service providers, IPs and things like that.”

William Binney former U.S. intelligence official and cryptoanalyst; whistleblower

source: William Binney - 'The Government is Profiling You' - video lecture at MIT https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qB3KR8fWNh0

Books , World , Knowledge

“Hospitality still survives among foreigners, although it is buried under false pride among the poorest Americans.”

Jane Addams (1860–1935) pioneer settlement social worker

Source: Twenty Years at Hull-House (1910), Ch. 11

“And yet there is an anger that purifies the heart:
The anger of the better against the baser part,
Against the false and wicked, against the tyrant's sword,
Against the enemies of love, and all that hate the Lord.”

Henry Van Dyke (1852–1933) American diplomat

Righteous Wrath, st. 2 (January 1918).

Love , Hate , Heart , Parting

“"Among the types of human activity which have always played a role in history, the soldier is least subject to ressentiment. Nietzsche is right in pointing out that the priest is most exposed to this danger, though the conclusions about religious morality which he draws from this insight are inadmissible. It is true that the very requirements of his profession, quite apart from his individual or national temperament, expose the priest more than any other human type to the creeping poison of ressentiment. In principle he is not supported by secular power; indeed he affirms the fundamental weakness of such power. Yet, as the representative of a concrete institution, he is to be sharply distinguished from the homo religiosus—he is placed in the middle of party struggle. More than any other man, he is condemned to control his emotions (revenge, wrath, hatred) at least outwardly, for he must always represent the image and principle of “peacefulness.” The typical “priestly policy” of gaining victories through suffering rather than combat, or through the counterforces which the sight of the priest's suffering produces in men who believe that he unites them with God, is inspired by ressentiment. There is no trace of ressentiment in genuine martyrdom; only the false martyrdom of priestly policy is guided by it. This danger is completely avoided only when priest and homo religiosus coincide."”

Max Scheler (1874–1928) German philosopher

Das Ressentiment im Aufbau der Moralen (1912)

Men , God , Peace , History

“I do not trust my eyes to tell me what a man is: I have a better and more trustworthy light by which I can distinguish what is true from what is false: let the mind find out what is good for the mind.”
Oculis de homine non credo, habeo melius et certius lumen quo a falsis uera diiudicem: animi bonum animus inueniat.

Seneca the Younger Moral Essays

De Vita Beata (On the Happy Life): cap. 2, line 2
Alternate translation: I do not distinguish by the eye, but by the mind, which is the proper judge of the man. (translator unknown).
Moral Essays

Light

“Public officers, whose character and conduct remain open to debate and free discussion in the press, find their remedies for false accusations in actions under libel laws providing for redress and punishment, and not in proceedings to restrain the publication of newspapers and periodicals. The general principle that the constitutional guaranty of the liberty of the press gives immunity from previous restraints has been approved in many decisions under the provisions of state constitutions. The importance of this immunity has not lessened. While reckless assaults upon public men, and efforts to bring obloquy upon those who are endeavoring faithfully to discharge official duties, exert a baleful influence and deserve the severest condemnation in public opinion, it cannot be said that this abuse is greater, and it is believed to be less, than that which characterized the period in which our institutions took shape. Meanwhile, the administration of government has become more complex, the opportunities for malfeasance and corruption have multiplied, crime has grown to most serious proportions, and the danger of its protection by unfaithful officials and of the impairment of the fundamental security of life and property by criminal alliances and official neglect, emphasizes the primary need of a vigilant and courageous press, especially in great cities. The fact that the liberty of the press may be abused by miscreant purveyors of scandal does not make any the less necessary the immunity of the press from previous restraint in dealing with official misconduct. Subsequent punishment for such abuses as may exist is the appropriate remedy consistent with constitutional privilege.”

Charles Evans Hughes (1862–1948) American judge

Near v. Minnesota, 283 U.S. 697 (1931).
Judicial opinions

Life , Men , Unfaithfulness , Law

“Oh! why should woman ever love,
Trusting to one false star above;
And fling her little chance away
Of sunshine for its treacherous ray.”

Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802–1838) English poet and novelist

Canto IV
The Troubadour (1825)

Love , Star , Chance

“It is almost as difficult to make a man unlearn his errors as his knowledge. Mal-information is more hopeless than non-information; for error is always more busy than ignorance. Ignorance is a blank sheet, on which we may write; but error is a scribbled one, on which we must first erase. Ignorance is contented to stand still with her back to the truth; but error is more presumptuous, and proceeds in the same direction. Ignorance has no light, but error follows a false one. The consequence is, that error, when she retraces her footsteps, has further to go, before she can arrive at the truth, than ignorance.”

Charles Caleb Colton (1777–1832) British priest and writer

Vol. I; I
Lacon (1820)

Truth , Error , Business , Knowledge

“Because Europe was reacting against Islam it belittled the influence of Saracens and exaggerated its dependence on its Greek and Roman heritage. So today an important task for us is to correct this false emphasis and to acknowledge fully our debt to the Arab and Islamic world.”

William Montgomery Watt (1909–2006) Scottish historian

The influence of Islam on medieval Europe, Edinburgh University Press, 1973, p. 84

World , Dependency

“‘Brethren, if outsiders should speak against me, or against the Doctrine, or against the Order, you should not on that account either bear malice, or suffer heart-burning, or feel ill will. If you, on that account, should be angry and hurt, that would stand in the way of your, own self-conquest. If, when others speak against us, you feel angry at that, and displeased, would you then be able to judge how far that speech of theirs is well said or ill?’
‘That would not be so, Sir.’
‘But when outsiders speak in dispraise of me, or of the Doctrine, or of the Order, you should unravel what is false and point it out as wrong, saying: “For this or that reason this is not the fact, that is not so, such a thing is not found among us, is not in us.”
‘But also, brethren, if outsiders should speak in praise of me, in praise of the Doctrine, in praise of the Order, you should not, on that account, be filled with pleasure or gladness, or be lifted up in heart. Were you to be so that also would stand in the way of your self-conquest. When outsiders speak in praise of me, or of the Doctrine, or of the Order, you should acknowledge what is right to be the fact, saying: “For this or that reason this is the fact, that is so, such a thing is found among us, is in us.””

Gautama Buddha (-563–-483 BC) philosopher, reformer and the founder of Buddhism

T. W. Rhys Davids trans. (1899), Brahmajāla Sutta, verse 1.5-6 https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Brahmajala_Sutta#Brahmaj.C4.81la_Sutta_.5B9.5D_-_The_Perfect_Net (text at archive.org https://archive.org/stream/bookofdiscipline02hornuoft#page/3/mode/1up), as cited in: (1992). A Comparative History of Ideas, p. 221-2
Source: Pali Canon, Sutta Pitaka, Digha Nikaya (Long Discourses)

Pleasure , Way , Feeling , Suffering

“These cases are all psychological manipulation under the guise of assistance. They sell false hope. That's a very powerful product when you’re a person that's desperate.”

Bob Nygaard private detective specializing in psychic fraud

Psychic Freed in Florida Caught Chasing Seattle Spirits https://web.archive.org/web/20180224064019/https://www.newsmax.com/TheWire/psychic-florida-chasing-spirits/2017/11/02/id/823719, newsmax.com (2 November 2017)

Hope , Personality

“Of what violences, murders, depredations, have not the epic poets, from all antiquity, been the occasion, by propagating false honour, false glory, and false religion?”

Samuel Richardson book The History of Sir Charles Grandison

Vol. 6, letter 45.
Sir Charles Grandison (1753–1754)

Religion

“Excess of interest in both her own and in the stranger’s personality merge in feminine surrender, the urge to lose herself completely in a human being; but in so doing, she does justice neither to self nor to the humanity of another, and, at the same time, becomes unfit for exercising other duties.
Also connected to the false pursuit of prestige is a perverted desire for totality and inclusiveness, a mania to know everything and thereby to skim the surface of everything and to plunge deeply into nothing. However, such superficiality can never be true humanity.”

Edith Stein (1891–1942) Jewish-German nun, theologian and philosopher

Essays on Woman (1996), The Significance of Woman's Intrinsic Value in National Life (1928)

Justice , Exercises , Time , Personality

“The Bible was regarded as not only true, but as the best of all truth. Any new theory advanced, was immediately examined in the light, or rather in the darkness, of revelation, and if according to that test it was false, it was denounced, and the person bringing it forward forced to recant. It would have been a far better course to have discovered every theory found to be in harmony with the Scriptures.”

Robert G. Ingersoll (1833–1899) Union United States Army officer

My Reviewers Reviewed (lecture from June 27, 1877, San Francisco, CA)

Truth , Light , Personality

“Recalling all the erroneous things that doctors have been able to say about sex or madness does us a fat lot of good. I think that what is currently politically important is to determine the regime of verediction established at a given moment … on the basis of which you can now recognize, for example, that doctors in the nineteenth century said so many stupid things about sex. … It is not so much the history of the true or the history of the false as the history of verediction which has a political significance.”

Michel Foucault book The Birth of Biopolitics

Lecture 2, January 17, 1979, p. 36
The Birth of Biopolitics (1978)

Stupidity , Sex , History , Thinking

“Opinion considers the opposition of what is true and false quite rigid, and, confronted with a philosophical system, it expects agreement or contradiction. And in an explanation of such a system, opinion still expects to find one or the other.”

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel book The Phenomenology of Spirit

Preface, § 2
The Phenomenology of Spirit (1807)

“Is there fake news on Facebook? Of course there is. I could go right now on Facebook and say there’s an earthquake, Richter scale 7, in Washington, D. C. And should I be allowed to do that or should that be something that somehow Facebook has a way to control? I don’t know. I get how Facebook could control advertising. I don’t get how they’re a value proposition, which people – the world does like. I don’t understand how it works at all if you have no freedom of speech, even if you are saying things that are patently false.”

Steve Ballmer (1956) American businessman who was the chief executive officer of Microsoft

Yahoo Finance: "Ex-Microsoft CEO Ballmer: How Silicon Valley should handle some of its most vexing questions" https://finance.yahoo.com/news/ex-microsoft-ceo-ballmer-silicon-valley-handle-vexing-questions-182046774.html (22 June 2018)
2010s

People , World , Way , Understanding

Quotes about fake page 4

Quotes about fake
page 4