“The men the American people admire most extravagantly are the most daring liars; the men they detest most violently are those who try to tell them the truth.” Henry Louis Mencken
“The masses have never thirsted after truth. Whoever can supply them with illusions is easily their master; whoever attempts to destroy their illusions is always their victim.” Gustave Le Bon
“When the natural weakness and imperfection of human understanding is considered, with the unavoidable influences of education, custom, books and company, upon our ways of thinking, I imagine a man must have a good deal of vanity who believes, and a good deal of boldness who affirms, that all the doctrines he holds, are true, and all he rejects are false.” Benjamin Franklin, 1740
“The governors of the world believe, and have always believed, that virtue can only be taught by teaching falsehood, and that any man who knew the truth would be wicked. I disbelieve this, absolutely and entirely. I believe that love of truth is the basis of all real virtue, and that virtues based upon lies can only do harm.” Bertrand Russell
“For the great majority of mankind are satisfied with appearances, as though they were realities, and are often more influenced by the things that seem than by those that are.” Niccolo Machiavelli
“The modern susceptibility to conformity and obedience to authority indicates that the truth endorsed by authority is likely to be accepted as such by a majority of the people.” David Edwards
"All great truths begin as blasphemies." - George Bernard Shaw
If our condition were truly happy, we would not seek diversion from it in order to make ourselves happy.
Blaise Pascal
I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in reality. This is why right, temporarily defeated, is stronger than evil triumphant.-- Martin Luther King
"The ideal tyranny is that which is ignorantly self-administered by its victims. The most perfect slaves are, therefore, those which blissfully and unawaredly enslave themselves."
Dresden James
When a well-packaged web of lies has been sold gradually to the masses over generations, the truth will seem utterly preposterous and its speaker a raving lunatic.- Dresden James
The aim of a joke is not to degrade the human being, but to remind him that he is already degraded.
George Orwell
the fool doth thinks he is wise but the wise man knows himself to be a fool
William Shakespeare
The foolish and the dead alone never change their opinions.
-James Russel Lowell
"A man may die, nations may rise and fall, but an idea lives on."
"A nation that is afraid to let its people judge the truth and falsehood in an open market is a nation that is afraid of its people."
"It does not matter if the war is not real. The war is not meant to be won but to be continuous. A hierarchical society is only possible on the basis of poverty and ignorance."
-George Orwell, 1984
Nationalism is power hunger tempered by self-deception.
George Orwell
The trouble with people is not that they don't know but that they know so much that ain't so.
Josh Billings
God offers to every mind its choice between truth and repose. Take which you please; you can never have both. -Ralph Waldo Emerson
All this worldly wisdom was once the unamiable heresy of some wise man.
Henry David Thoreau
“An honest politician is one who, when he is bought, stays bought.” Simon Cameron, Lincoln’s Secretary of War
“Make the lie big, make it simple, keep saying it, and eventually they will believe it.” Adolf Hitler
“We allow the most atrocious lies uttered by political and moral prostitutes to go unchallenged. These lies are endlessly recycled in the commercial media until they become ingrained in the public conscience as truth. Worse than burying our heads in the sand, we bury them up our collective ass. How do you like the view?” Charles Sullivan
“The statesmen will invent cheap lies, putting the blame upon the nation that is attacked, and every man will be glad of those conscience-soothing falsities, and will diligently study them, and refuse to examine any refutations of them; and thus he will by and by convince himself that the war is just, and will thank God for the better sleep he enjoys after this process of grotesque self-deception.” Mark Twain
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