Quotes about fake
page 9

River Phoenix photo
Adrienne Rich photo
Eric Temple Bell photo

“The so-called obvious was repeatedly scrutinized from every angle and was frequently found to be not obvious but false. "Obvious" is the most dangerous word in mathematics.”

Eric Temple Bell (1883–1960) mathematician and science fiction author born in Scotland who lived in the United States for most of his li…

Source: Mathematics: Queen and Servant of Science (1938), p. 16

Auguste Rodin photo

“Gsell: What astonishes me, is that your way is so different from that of other sculptors. They prose the model. Instead of that, you wait till a model has instinctively or accidentally taken an Interesting pose, and thon you reproduce It. Instead of your giving orders to the model, the model gives orders to you.
Rodin: I am not at the model's orders; I am at Nature's. Doubtless my confreres have their reasons for proceeding as they do. But when one constrains Nature in that way and treats human beings as mannikins, one runs a risk of getting nothing but dead, artificial results. A hunter of truth and a trapper of life. I am careful not to follow their example. I seize upon the movements I observe, but I don't dictate them. when a subject requires a predetermined pose, I merely Indicate It. For I want only what reality will afford without being forced. In everything I obey Nature. I never assume to command her. My sole ambition Is a servile fidelity.
Gsell : And yet, you take liberties with nature. You make changes.
Rodin : Not at all. I should be false to myself if I did.
Gsell : But you finished work is never like the plaster sketch
Rodin : That is so, but the sketch is far less true than the finished work. It would Impossible for a model to keep a living attitude during all the time it takes to shape the clay. Still, I retain a general idea of the pose and require the model to conform to it. But this is not all. The sketch reproduces only the exterior. I must next reproduce the spirit, which is every whit as essential a part of Nature. I see the whole truth — not merely the fraction of it that lies upon the surface. I accentuate tho lines that best express the spiritual state I am Interpreting.”

Auguste Rodin (1840–1917) French sculptor

Rodin on realism, 1910

Lauren Southern photo
Dietrich Bonhoeffer photo
Koenraad Elst photo
John Gray photo
Benjamin Ricketson Tucker photo
Frank P. Ramsey photo
Ken Ham photo
Stephen L. Carter photo
Thomas Hobbes photo
Christopher Hampton photo

“I always divide people into two groups. Those who live by what they know to be a lie, and those who live by what they believe, falsely, to be the truth.”

Christopher Hampton (1946) British playwright, screenwriter and film director

Don, in The Philanthropist (1969), scene 6

Andrei Tarkovsky photo

“An artist needs knowledge and the power of observation only so that he can tell from what he is abstaining, and to be sure that his abstention will not appear artificial or false.”

Andrei Tarkovsky (1932–1986) Soviet and Russian film-maker, writer, film editor, film theorist, theatre and opera director

Journal entry (7 July 1980); published in Time Within Time: The Diaries 1970-1986 (1989)

Letitia Elizabeth Landon photo
Warren Farrell photo
Richard Bertrand Spencer photo
John Ruskin photo

“How false is the conception, how frantic the pursuit, of that treacherous phantom which men call Liberty.”

Source: The Seven Lamps of Architecture (1849), Chapter VII: The Lamp of Obedience, section 1.

Robert G. Ingersoll photo

“The more false we destroy the more room there will be for the true.”

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

"Orthodoxy" (1884). The Complete Works of Robert G. Ingersoll (1902) Vol. 2. p. 343

Amir Taheri photo

“Syria these days reminds me of an orphan surrounded by real enemies and false friends, forming a club of cynics, and trying to seize control of its destiny.”

Amir Taheri (1942) Iranian journalist

Opinion: The Syrian Orphan and a Club of Cynics http://english.aawsat.com/2015/09/article55345155/opinion-the-syrian-orphan-and-a-club-of-cynics, Ashraq Al-Awsat (18 Sep, 2015).

Robert M. Pirsig photo
Peter Sloterdijk photo
Muhammad photo
Herbert Marcuse photo
Adyashanti photo
Ignatius of Antioch photo
Ali Meshkini photo
Carl Eckart photo
Elizabeth Loftus photo
Emil M. Cioran photo
Percy Bysshe Shelley photo

“One word is too often profaned
For me to profane it;
One feeling too falsely disdained
For thee to disdain it.”

Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822) English Romantic poet

One Word is Too Often Profaned http://www.readprint.com/work-1370/Percy-Bysshe-Shelley (1821), st. 1

Paul of Tarsus photo

“If you learn one thing from having lived through decades of changing views, it is that all predictions are necessarily false.”

M. H. Abrams (1912–2015) American literary theorist

Cornell Chronicle interview (1999)

Herbert Marcuse photo
Wilhelm Liebknecht photo

“All who are weary and heavy laden; all who suffer under injustice; all who suffer from the outrages of the existing bourgeois society; all who have in them the feeling of the worth of humanity, look to us, turn hopefully to us, as the only party that can bring rescue and deliverance. And if we, the opponents of this unjust world of violence, suddenly reach out the hand of brotherhood to it, conclude alliances with its representatives, invite our comrades to go hand in hand with the enemy whose misdeeds have driven the masses into our camp, what confusion must result in their minds! … It must be that for the hundreds and thousands, for the millions that have sought salvation under our banner, it was all a colossal mistake for them to come to us. If we are not different from the others, then we are not the right ones – the Savior is yet to come; and the Social Democracy was a false Messiah, no better than the other false ones! Just in this fact lies our strength, that we are not like the others, and that we are not only not like the others, and that we are not simply different from the others, but that we are their deadly enemy, who have sworn to storm and demolish the Bastile of Capitalism, whose defenders all those others are. Therefore we are only strong when we are alone. This is not to say that we are to individualise or to isolate ourselves. We have never lacked for company, and we never shall so long as the fight lasts. On the essentially true but literally false phrase about a “single reactionary mass,” the Social Democracy has never believed since it passed from the realm of theory to that of practice. We know that the individual members and divisions of the “single reactionary mass” are in conflict with each other, and we have always used these conflicts for our purposes. We have used opponents against opponents, but have never allowed them to use us.”

Wilhelm Liebknecht (1826–1900) German socialist politician

No Compromise – No Political Trading (1899)

“Wowers never speede well, that have a false harte.”

Mathew Merygreeke, Act I, sc. ii.
Ralph Roister Doister (c. 1553)

Charles Taze Russell photo
Al Gore photo

“American troops and American taxpayers are shouldering a huge burden with no end in sight because Mr. Bush took us to war on false premises and with no plan to win the peace.”

Al Gore (1948) 45th Vice President of the United States

"How to Debate George Bush" in The New York Times (29 September 2004).

Brian Cox (physicist) photo

“Skepticism must go hand in hand with rationality. When theories are shown to be false, the correct thing to do is to move on.”

Brian Cox (physicist) (1968) English physicist and former musician

in a response on forum LHCConcerns as quoted by Gia Milinovich (2008-09-06) http://www.giagia.co.uk/2008/09/06/cern-scientists-receive-death-threats

Tibullus photo

“Jupiter laughs at the false oaths of lovers.”
Periuria ridet amantum<br/>Iuppiter.

Tibullus (-50–-19 BC) poet and writer (0054-0019)

Periuria ridet amantum
Iuppiter.
Bk. 3, no. 6, line 49.
Misattributed

Warren Farrell photo
Georges Braque photo

“Whatever is in common is true; but likeness is false. Trouillebert's work bears a likeness to that of Corot, but they have nothing in common.”

Georges Braque (1882–1963) French painter and sculptor

Braque admired Corot and frequently used Corot's young country-ladies as models, for instance in his painting 'Souvenirs de Corot' he made in 1922/23
Source: 1921 - 1945, p. 96 - quote of Braque from 'Cahiers d'art', No. 10, 1935, ed. Christian Zervos - quote of Braque is referring to Corot's impact on his painting art

Claude McKay photo
Otto Pfleiderer photo
Robert Fisk photo
Michael Crichton photo
Nabeel Qureshi (author) photo
John Lancaster Spalding photo

“When one sense has been bribed the others readily bear false witness.”

John Lancaster Spalding (1840–1916) Catholic bishop

Source: Aphorisms and Reflections (1901), p. 207

E.E. Cummings photo
Tom Robbins photo
Calvin Coolidge photo
Upton Sinclair photo
Jack Vance photo
Samuel Johnson photo
Newton Lee photo

“Temporary safety is not the same as long-term security. A false sense of security is like the calm before the storm.”

Newton Lee American computer scientist

Counterterrorism and Cybersecurity: Total Information Awareness (2nd Edition), 2015

Felix Adler photo
Jacob Zuma photo
Roger Williams (theologian) photo

“Such parents or children as aim at the gain and preferment of religion do often mistake gain and gold for godliness, godbelly for the true God, and some false for the true Lord Jesus.”

Roger Williams (theologian) (1603–1684) English Protestant theologian and founder of the colony of Providence Plantation

The Hireling Ministry, None of Christ's (1652)

F. H. Bradley photo

“Eclecticism. Every truth is so true that any truth must be false.”

F. H. Bradley (1846–1924) British philosopher

No. 6.
Aphorisms (1930)

Paul Karl Feyerabend photo
Leo Tolstoy photo
Agatha Christie photo
Guy Debord photo
Jonah Goldberg photo
Burkard Schliessmann photo

“To approach Bach, one has to realize that 100 years after Bach’s death, Bach and his music totally had been forgotten. Even while he was still alive, Bach himself believed in the polyphonic power and the resulting symmetric architectures of well-proportioned music. But this had been an artificial truth - even for him. Other composers, including his sons, already composed in another style, where they found other ideals and brought them to new solutions. The spirit of the time already had changed while Bach was still alive. A hundred years later, it was Mendelssohn who about 1850 discovered Bach anew with the performance of the St. Matthew Passion. Now a new renaissance began, and the world learned to know the greatness of Bach. To become acquainted with Bach, many transcriptions were done. But the endeavors in rediscovering Bach had been - stylistically - in a wrong direction. Among these were the orchestral transcriptions of Leopold Stokowski, and the organ interpretations of the multitalented Albert Schweitzer, who, one has to confess, had a decisive effect on the rediscovery of Bach. All performances had gone in the wrong direction: much too romantic, with a false knowledge of historic style, the wrong sound, the wrong rubato, and so on. The necessity of artists like Rosalyn Tureck and Glenn Gould - again 100 years later - has been understandable: The radicalism of Glenn Gould pointed out the real clarity and the internal explosions of the power-filled polyphony in the best way. This extreme style, called by many of his critics refrigerator interpretations, however really had been necessary to demonstrate the right strength to bring out the architecture in the right manner, which had been lost so much before. I’m convinced that the style Glenn Gould played has been the right answer. But there has been another giant: it was no less than Helmut Walcha who, also beginning in the 1950, started his legendary interpretations for the DG-Archive productions of the complete organ-work cycle on historic organs (Silbermann, Arp Schnitger). Also very classical in strength of speed and architectural proportions, he pointed out the polyphonic structures in an enlightened but moreover especially humanistic way, in a much more smooth and elegant way than Glenn Gould on the piano. Some years later it was Virgil Fox who acquainted the U. S. with tours of the complete Bach cycle, which certainly was effective in its own way, but much more modern than Walcha. The ranges of Bach interpretations had become wide, and there were the defenders of the historical style and those of the much more modern romantic style. Also the performances of the orchestral and cantata Bach had become extreme: on one side, for example, Karl Richter, who used a big and rich-toned orchestra; on the other side Helmut Rilling, whose Bach was much more historically oriented.”

Burkard Schliessmann classical pianist

Talkings on Bach

Giordano Bruno photo
Joseph Joubert photo
Thomas Carlyle photo
Arun Shourie photo

“And yet, none of this is accidental. As we have seen in the texts that we have surveyed in this book, it is all part of a line. India turns out to be a recent construct. It turns out to be neither a country nor a nation. Hinduism turns out to be an invention – surprised at the word? You won’t be a few pages hence – of the British in the late nineteenth century. Simultaneously, it has always been inherently intolerant. Pre-Islamic India was a den of iniquity, of oppression. Islamic rule liberated the oppressed. It was in this period that the Ganga-Jamuna culture, the ‘composite culture’ of India was formed, with Amir Khusro as the great exponent of it, and the Sufi savants as the founts. The sense of nationhood did not develop even in that period. It developed only in response to British rule, and because of ideas that came to us from the West. But even this – the sense of being a country, of being a nation, such as it was – remained confined to the upper crust of Indians. It is the communists who awakened the masses to awareness and spread these ideas among them.
In a word, India is not real – only the parts are real. Class is real. Religion is real – not the threads in it that are common and special to our religions but the aspects of religion that divide us, and thus ensure that we are not a nation, a country, those elements are real. Caste is real. Region is real. Language is real – actually, that is wrong: the line is that languages other than Sanskrit are real; Sanskrit is dead and gone; in any case, it was not, the averments in the great scholar, Horace Wilson to the House of Commons Select Committee notwithstanding, that it was the very basis, the living basis of other languages of the country; rather, it was the preserve of the upper layer, the instrument of domination and oppression; one of the vehicles of perpetuating false consciousness among the hapless masses.”

Arun Shourie (1941) Indian journalist and politician

Eminent Historians: Their Technology, Their Line, Their Fraud

Pushyamitra Shunga photo

“Even a very general knowledge of Indian history already shows that any instances of Hindu persecution of Buddhism could never have been more than marginal. After fully seventeen centuries of Buddhism's existence, from the 6 th century BC to the late 12 th century AD, most of it under the rule of Hindu kings, we find Buddhist establishments flourishing all over India. Under king Pushyamitra Shunga, often falsely labelled as a persecutor of Buddhism, important Buddhist centres such as the Sanchi stupa were built. As late as the early 12 th century, the Buddhist monastery Dharmachakrajina Vihara at Sarnath was built under the patronage of queen Kumaradevi, wife of Govindachandra, the Hindu king of Kanauj in whose reign the contentious Rama temple in Ayodhya was built. This may be contrasted with the ruined state of Buddhism in countries like Afghanistan or Uzbekistan after one thousand or even one hundred years of Muslim rule. Indeed, the Muslim chroniclers themselves have described in gleeful detail how they destroyed Buddhism root and branch in the entire Gangetic plain in just a few years after Mohammed Ghori's victory in the second battle of Tarain in 1192. The famous university of Nalanda with its fabulous library burned for weeks. Its inmates were put to the sword except for those who managed to flee. The latter spread the word to other Indian regions where Buddhist monks packed up and left in anticipation of further Muslim conquests. It is apparent that this way, some abandoned Buddhist establishments were taken over by Hindus; but that is an entirely different matter from the forcible occupation or destruction of Buddhist institutions by the foreign invaders.”

Pushyamitra Shunga King of Sunga Dynasty

Koenraad Elst: Religious Cleansing of Hindus, 2004, Agni conference in The Hague, and in: K. Elst The Problem with Secularism, 2007

Brigham Young photo
S. Nambi Narayanan photo
Anthony Burgess photo
Pope Benedict XVI photo
Augustus De Morgan photo
Michael Crichton photo
Richard Rodríguez photo
George Holmes Howison photo
Yusuf Qaradawi photo

“There are many democracies in our Arab and Islamic countries, but unfortunately, they are all false democracies.”

Yusuf Qaradawi (1926) Egyptian imam

Sheik Youssef Al-Qaradhawi in Favor of Democratic Elections in the Arab World http://www.memritv.org/clip_transcript/en/129.htm June 2004.
Democracy

Hideki Tōjō photo

“It is natural that I should bear entire responsibility for the war in general, and, needless to say, I am prepared to do so. Consequently, now that the war has been lost, it is presumably necessary that I be judged so that the circumstances of the time can be clarified and the future peace of the world be assured. Therefore, with respect to my trial, it is my intention to speak frankly, according to my recollection, even though when the vanquished stands before the victor, who has over him the power of life and death, he may be apt to toady and flatter. I mean to pay considerable attention to this in my actions, and say to the end that what is true is true and what is false is false. To shade one's words in flattery to the point of untruthfulness would falsify the trial and do incalculable harm to the nation, and great care must be taken to avoid this.”

Hideki Tōjō (1884–1948) former Prime Minister of Japan and Minister of War executed in 1948

Written in his prison diary https://books.google.com/books?id=aynFAgAAQBAJ&pg=PA217&lpg=PA217&dq=%22I+should+bear+entire+responsibility+for+the+war+in+general%22&source=bl&ots=ov6_NlNuJx&sig=W_gAxNsPYqUMqh-FE1WF4CbCQ-8&hl=en&sa=X&ei=QZHsVMKlLsKiNrnDg6AP&ved=0CDIQ6AEwAw#v=onepage&q=%22I%20should%20bear%20entire%20responsibility%20for%20the%20war%20in%20general%22&f=false, as quoted in The Imperial Japanese Army: The Invincible Years 1941–42 https://books.google.com/books?id=LTZfBAAAQBAJ&pg=PA337&lpg=PA337&dq=%22I+should+bear+entire+responsibility+for+the+war+in+general%22&source=bl&ots=wiF4ARAlht&sig=EjofLr6zBGo9YG4b0dBGjL91VB0&hl=en&sa=X&ei=QZHsVMKlLsKiNrnDg6AP&ved=0CEIQ6AEwBw#v=onepage&q=%22I%20should%20bear%20entire%20responsibility%20for%20the%20war%20in%20general%22&f=false (2014), by Bill Yenne, Oxford, United Kingdom: Oxford Publishing, p. 337.
1940s

Ernst Bloch photo
Dinah Craik photo
Martin Farquhar Tupper photo
Robert Todd Carroll photo
Sam Harris photo
Andrew Sullivan photo
Frederick William Robertson photo
Mao Zedong photo
H. G. Wells photo

“For crude classifications and false generalisations are the curse of all organised human life.”

Source: A Modern Utopia (1905), Ch. 10, sect. 1

Calvin Coolidge photo
Clement Attlee photo
Manis Friedman photo