Falsity Quotes

“Lies are neither bad nor good. Like a fire they can either keep you warm or burn you to death, depending on how they're used.”
― Max Brooks, World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War

“We all know that any emotional bias -- irrespective of truth or falsity -- can be implanted by suggestion in the emotions of the young, hence the inherited traditions of an orthodox community are absolutely without evidential value.... If religion were true, its followers would not try to bludgeon their young into an artificial conformity; but would merely insist on their unbending quest for truth, irrespective of artificial backgrounds or practical consequences. With such an honest and inflexible openness to evidence, they could not fail to receive any real truth which might be manifesting itself around them. The fact that religionists do not follow this honourable course, but cheat at their game by invoking juvenile quasi-hypnosis, is enough to destroy their pretensions in my eyes even if their absurdity were not manifest in every other direction.”
― H.P. Lovecraft, Against Religion: The Atheist Writings of H.P. Lovecraft

“Intellectuals are judged not by their morals, but by the quality of their ideas, which are rarely reducible to simple verdicts of truth or falsity, if only because banalities are by definition accurate.”
― Perry Anderson, Spectrum: From Right to Left in the World of Ideas

“No human being can be so honest as to become completely false.”
― Yukio Mishima

“It is the unspeakable misery of a life so false as his, that it steals the pith and substance out of whatever realities there are around us, and which were meant by Heaven to be the spirit’s joy and nutriment. To the untrue man, the whole universe is false—it is impalpable—it shrinks to nothing within his grasp. And he himself in so far as he shows himself in a false light, becomes a shadow, or, indeed, ceases to exist.”
― Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter

“We all fashion ourselves to the false world in which we live and in so doing become false ourselves. I saw this all the time during the occupation. How people could convince themselves that locking up and deporting Jews, including children, was a rational consequence of events. How the same people who shrugged off news of executions and deportations were beside themselves with rage when someone tried to jump a queue.”
― Glenn Haybittle, The Tree House

“Perception is more important than reality. If someone perceives something to be true, it is more important than if it is in fact true.”
― Ivanka Trump

“And what is an authentic madman? It is a man who preferred to become mad, in the socially accepted sense of the word, rather than forfeit a certain superior idea of human honor. So society has strangled in its asylums all those it wanted to get rid of or protect itself from, because they refused to become its accomplices in certain great nastinesses. For a madman is also a man whom society did not want to hear and whom it wanted to prevent from uttering certain intolerable truths.”
― Artaud, Antonin

“Living alone, with no one to consult or talk to, one might easily become melodramatic, and imagine things which had no foundation on fact.”
― Agatha Christie, Murder Is Easy

“We live by the images of those we decide are heroes and gods.”
― Kathy Acker, My Mother: Demonology

“Are designations congruent with things? Is language the adequate expression of all realities?
It is only by means of forgetfulness that man can ever reach the point of fancying himself to possess a "truth" of the grade just indicated. If he will not be satisfied with truth in the form of tautology, that is to say, if he will not be content with empty husks, then he will always exchange truths for illusions.”
― Friedrich Neitzsche

“The path of truth has meadows of falsity. (Le chemin de la vérité A des prairies de fausseté.)”
― Charles de Leusse

“Of course, there is no way to avoid being a hypocrite, even when seeking to remove oneself from the falseness of this material existence. And perhaps, this attribution of ‘falseness’ is not sufficiently accurate as a descriptor either; yet, how else is it to be articulated if something of it seems inauthentic and insincere as though existence itself were mediated through codes and objects and structures that constrained the domain of possibility, or rather relegated the notion of free will as becoming a reaction to prompts and the construct of independent action as having emerged from latent subsets of choices that presented themselves according to the dynamic interplay of obligation, code, preservation and groupthink?”
― Ashim Shanker, Inward and Toward

“Maud’s manner indicated that the falsity of the story was an insignificant flaw in its general delightfulness.”
― Sinclair Lewis, Main Street

“A phrase caught Brunetti’s attention, and he went back and read it again, and then again. ‘I give only one example of the falsity of gossip and hearsay, and I urge my readers to beware of incredible tales, however widely they might be believed and instead to believe the unvarnished truth;’
Brunetti let the open book fall on to his stomach and stared out the window at rooftops and windows that reflected the setting sun. Two thousand years ago, the bulk of the population illiterate, most news was transmitted by word of mouth, and Tacitus was warning his readers to be careful about believing what they heard and to trust only unvarnished truth. ‘Whatever that is,’ a voice whispered to Brunetti’s inner ear. Had Tacitus been a prophet as well as an historian, Brunetti wondered, by so well anticipating the consequences of television and social media?”
― Donna Leon

“Today. the celebration is for the "victorious", not the meritorious. The depiction to the youth, is that one can be victorious without merit, and that merit is less notable than victory. The result, is the masses are selectively and passively affirming that winning trumps hard work, that theft trumps the pride of ownership, and that personal success trumps collective progress.”
― Justin Kyle McFarlane Beau

“I remember so many things [. . .] The problem is, only half of them are true . . . and the half which is true keeps changing places with the half which is false.”
― Peter David, Sir Apropos of Nothing

“It seemed to me that, no matter what endeavor I was involved in, I was to be something of a sham.”
― Peter David, Sir Apropos of Nothing

“For seventy years we have been brushing our teeth and yet they have not become clean, so is that thing for real or is it a falsity?”
― Dada Bhagwan

“Truth is what is useful to humanity, falsehood what is harmful.”
― Arthur Koestler, Darkness at Noon

“It seems the attributes our hypocrisy induces others to adduce to us would bring no value addition to our own conscience.”
― B.S. Murthy, Benign Flame: Saga of Love

“Fantasy never becomes ‘truth’ regardless of how much you fantasize about it being the truth.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough