Early in life I have noticed that no event is ever correctly reported in a newspaper, but in Spain, for the first time, I saw newspaper reports which did not bear any relation to the facts, not even the relationship which is implied in an ordinary lie. I saw great battles reported where there had been no fighting, and complete silence where hundreds of men had been killed. I saw troops who had fought bravely denounced as cowards and traitors, and others who had never seen a shot fired hailed as heroes of imaginary victories; and I saw newspapers in London retailing these lies and eager intellectuals building emotional superstructures over events that never happened. I saw, in fact, history being written not in terms of what happened but of what ought to have happened according to various “party lines.”
The further a society drifts from the truth, the more it will hate those that speak it.
- Topic: Society, Truth
- Location: Caribbean Sea
- Photo: Jeffrey Benjamin
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The Constitution is not an instrument for the government to restrain the people, it is an instrument for the people to restrain the government—lest it come to dominate our lives and interests.
You educate a man; you educate a man. You educate a woman; you educate a generation.
We know of no culture that has said, articulately, that there is no difference between men and women except in the way they contribute to the creation of the next generation.
Why has government been instituted? Because the passions of men will not conform to the dictates of reason & justice without constraint.
There can be no keener revelation of a society’s soul than the way in which it treats its children.
Collective fear stimulates herd instinct, and tends to produce ferocity toward those who are not regarded as members of the herd.
And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed—if all records told the same tale—then the lie passed into history and became truth.
The worst form of inequality is to try to make unequal things equal.
What is not good for the swarm is not good for the bee.
It is clear that the individual who persecutes a man, his brother, because he is not of the same opinion, is a monster.
The higher you soar the smaller we appear to those who cannot fly.
Every high civilization decays by forgetting obvious things.
Every civilization is, among other things, an arrangement for domesticating the passions and setting them to do useful work.
To anger a conservative, lie to him. To anger a liberal, tell him the truth.
People think that a liar gains a victory over his victim. What I've learned is that a lie is an act of self-abdication, because one surrenders one's reality to the person to whom one lies, making that person one's master, condemning oneself from then on to faking the sort of reality that person's view requires to be faked.
There are very few human beings who receive the truth, complete and staggering, by instant illumination. Most of them acquire it fragment by fragment, on a small scale, by successive developments, cellularly, like a laborious mosaic.
Can’t is the worst word that is written or spoken; Doing more harm here than slander and lies; On it is many a strong spirit broken, And with it many a good purpose dies.
Everything you said should be true but not everything true should be said.
A thief is a man in need. A liar is a man in fear.
All men make mistakes, but a good man yields when he knows he knows his course is wrong and repairs the evil. The only crime is pride.
