Jonathan Safran Foer Quotes

How to get people to vote against their interests and to really think against their interests is very clever. It's the cleverest ruling class that I have ever come across in history. It's been two hundred years at it. It's superb.

In a war, as indeed at most times, we become the ready victims of phrases.

For too long, politicians have been telling people what they want to hear.

The “cant” of the politician, like the cant of the “religious” man, is also protean in its guise, but its chief method is to explain away words. The politician can always show you that he didn’t mean what he says, but something rather different from what he says. Political cant consists in pretending to agreement with hearers, whoever they may be. This cant is part of the stock-in-trade of every politician, be he Tory, Whig, or Radical, and it is by its means that he tries to haul in stray votes.

Yes, Vajpayee and Advani are very clever speakers, but that does not mean everything they say is true.

There's nothing more oily and cynical in politics than telling the truth.

Is insincerity such a terrible thing? I think not. It is merely a method by which we can multiply our personalities.

Dissimulation is innate in woman, and almost as much a quality of the stupid as of the clever.

A just cause needs no interpreting. It carries its own case. But the unjust argument since it is sick, needs clever medicine.

How clever you are, my dear! You never mean a single word you say.

I think: the powers like to talk about "freedom" in order to wash the population's brains.

Politicians use statistics in the same way that a drunk uses lamp-postsfor support rather than illumination.

When one watches some tired hack on the platform mechanically repeating the familiar phrases - bestial atrocities, iron heel, blood-stained tyranny, free peoples of the world, stand shoulder to shoulder - one often has a curious feeling that one is not watching a live human being but some kind of dummy, the appropriate noises are coming out of his larynx, but his brain is not involved

There are many foolish people in the world and when a man in a rather high position puts on no frills, slaps them on the back, and tells them he'll do anything in the world for them, they are very likely to think him clever.

I think my main concern is because I worry about demagoguery. It's real. You see the people standing up there and applauding.

The first casualty in any war is the truth. In World War II, I was part of a group of people who used to meet once a week with the sole purpose of analyzing the news and trying to work out what we weren't being told. We thought that we were clever, but we had absolutely no idea what was really going on. It was only years later that we learned the true story.

Americans were convinced in their own minds that they were very miserable, and those who think so are so. There is nothing so easy as to persuade people that they are badly governed. Take happy and comfortable people and talk to them with the art of the evil one, and they can soon be made discontented with their government, their rulers, with everything around them, and even with themselves.

[T]he only real moral crime that one man can commit against another is the attempt to create, by his words or actions, an impression of the contradictory, the impossible, the irrational, and thus shake the concept of rationality in his victim.

You listen to a politician making a speech, and it is like hearing nothing. Whereas, music is unmistakably music. The thing about music is that nobody listens to it unless it's real. I don't think that you can fool anybody for too long in music. And you certainly can't fool everybody.

LIBERTY! FREEDOM! DEMOCRACY! True anyhow no matter how many Liars use those words.

The political process consists entirely of politicians talking out of their butts.

The demagogue is usually sly, a detractor of others, a professor of humility and disinterestedness, a great stickler for equality as respects all above him, a man who acts in corners, and avoids open and manly expositions of his course, calls blackguards gentlemen, and gentlemen folks, appeals to passions and prejudices rather than to reason, and is in all respects, a man of intrigue and deception, of sly cunning and management.

Clever as the Devil and twice as pretty.

Television is never more false than when it's openly sincere.

To admire Satan [in Paradise Lost] is to give one's vote not only for a world of misery, but also for a world of lies and propaganda, of wishful thinking, of incessant autobiography.