False Narratives Quotes

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.

The primitive simplicity of their [the masses'] minds renders them a more easy prey to a big lie than a small one, for they themselves often tell little lies but would be ashamed to tell big ones.

We have seen the corrupting effects of a deliberate propaganda campaign driven by fake news.

I befriended a homeless man five years ago, bought him a new set of teeth, helped him get his life on track. A writer for 'Elle' spent two hours talking to this guy and discarded almost everything he said. When the story came out, we both were weeping while reading it on the street!

The ignorant classes had been taught to believe that certain words such as "sovereignty," "protection," and so forth had peculiar meanings disastrous to their welfare and significant of future political domination, like that from which they had been recently freed.

A democracy becomes ungovernable if a substantial portion of the population lives in an alternative reality…. How do you have a rational conversation about President Obama’s policies of he believes that Obama is a spy for Iran.

It's so easy for propaganda to work, and dissent to be mocked.

It's really easy, once somebody passes away, for the tales about them to become taller, the good ones and the bad ones.

It is very annoying - things have been written by people who didn't know me at all or Princess Diana. They were written by people who never knew me or met me. It did make me angry. I just stopped reading the papers.

I've never talked to anyone writing a book on me. I've had so much written about me that is made up, usually something that seems silly enough or weird enough to get remarked upon, and it's pretty much all fiction.

Fact-checking can wreak havoc on Chinese political mythology.

President Trump not only lies with astonishing temerity and abandon, but those lies connect into equally false narratives that gin up the worst fears and prejudices of his base.

Official truths are often powerful illusions.

Slavery ended and left its false images of black people intact

Foolish people follow the system, get caught up in media news, what the government wants you to believe and all the higher powers want you to believe, and go down the same path as all the sheep in the cattle market.

It is bad enough that so many people believe things without any evidence. What is worse is that some people have no conception of evidence and regard facts as just someone else's opinion.

There's so many lies being told throughout the media and people just run with the lies. They're numb to it. Too many followers, not enough leaders.

The American media is delivering nothing but fakeness.

Societies create their own history and tend to wipe out lowly beginnings, either by forgetting them or inventing totally fictitious heroic rescues.

I'm kind of a gossip hound, but watching the media whip the small fires into giant forest fires so that they can cover the result is infuriating.

For all I know we may be visited by a different extraterrestrial civilization every second Tuesday, but there's no support for this appealing idea. The extraordinary claims are not supported by extraordinary evidence.

A willingness by politicians to say what they think the public want to hear, and a willingness by large parts of the public to believe what they are told by populist politicians, has led to a deterioration in our public discourse.

The worst lies in life are the ones we tell ourselves.

America has a problem with fake hate crimes. The Left is always searching for the next big outrage, and sometimes when the pressure gets too high, they just decide to make them up.

Journalists have to call out and correct the lies and smears polluting the air waves.