talent to hoodwink the blind, and with a facility of speech well calculated to deceive the ignorant …
Abraham Lincoln is a man with
As a scholar I am interested in the philosophy of language, semiotics, call it what you want, and one of the main features of the human language is the possibility of lying.
Lie detection is like language; there is a learning window. Telling whoppers to small children seems to be a family tradition in many families.
Abuse of words has been the great instrument of sophistry and chicanery, of party, faction, and division of society.
Beware of the conversationalist who adds "in other words." He is merely starting afresh.
Language disguises thought.
People in life, when they have a tendency to exaggerate or lie or whatever, you always sort of notice that their voice goes up quite high.
If language was given to men to conceal their thoughts, then gesture's purpose was to disclose them.
I said there was a society of men among us, bred up from their youth in the art of proving by words multiplied for the purpose, that white is black, and black is white, according as they are paid. To this society all the rest of the people are as slaves.
Words are more treacherous and powerful than we think.
I remember reading once that some fellows use language to conceal thought; but it's been my experience that a good many more use it instead of thought.
When an idea is wanting, a word can always be found to take its place.
Jargon is the verbal sleight of hand that makes the old hat seem newly fashionable; it gives an air of novelty and specious profundity to ideas that, if stated directly, would seem superficial, stale, frivolous, or false. The line between serious and spurious scholarship is an easy one to blur, with jargon on your side.
Words are the least reliable purveyor of Truth.
Language always betrays us, tells the truth when we want to lie, and dissolves into formlessness when we would most like to be precise.
Whenever ideas fail, men invent words.
What sets men at variance is but the treachery of language, for always they desire the same things.
Words themselves - the very material of our discourse increasingly take on masks or disguises.
