Quotes to inspire and reflect

You can fool too many of the people too much of the time.

Man’s mind is so formed that it is far more susceptible to falsehood than to truth.

No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people.

Manipulations of opinion, insofar as they are inspired by well-defined interests, have limited goals; their effect, however, if they happen to touch upon an issue of authentic concern, is no longer subject to their control and may easily produce consequences they never foresaw or intended.

Every communist has a fascist frown, every fascist a communist smile.

One may smile, and smile, and be a villain.

Let us begin by committing ourselves to the truth, to see it like it is and to tell it like it is, to find the truth, to speak the truth and live with the truth. That’s what we’ll do.

God offers to every mind its choice between truth and repose. Take which you please—you can never have both.

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. ‘Who controls the past,’ ran the Party slogan, ‘controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.’

Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth.

The ability to discriminate between that which is true and that which is false is one of the last attainments of the human mind.

The truth may be stretched thin, but it never breaks, and it always surfaces above lies, as oil floats on water.

One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.

He who knows how to flatter also knows how to slander.

If decade after decade the truth cannot be told, each person’s mind begins to roam irretrievably. One’s fellow countrymen become harder to understand than Martians.

He who does not bellow the truth when he knows the truth makes himself the accomplice of liars and forgers.

Now, what I want is Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else. You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon Facts: nothing else will ever be of any service to them. This is the principle on which I bring up my own children, and this is the principle on which I bring up these children. Stick to Facts, sir!

It’s discouraging to think how many people are shocked by honesty and how few by deceit.

Everything that deceives may be said to enchant.

Talking much about oneself may be a way of hiding oneself.

Truthfulness has never been counted among the political virtues, and lies have always been regarded as justifiable tools in political dealings.

He is one of those orators of whom it was well said, ‘Before they get up, they do not know what they are going to say; when they are speaking, they do not know what they are saying; and when they sit down they do not know what they have said.’

I think if the people of this country can be reached with the truth, their judgment will be in favor of the many, as against the privileged few.

The true hypocrite is the one who ceases to perceive his deception, the one who lies with sincerity.

Men are so simple of mind, and so much dominated by their immediate needs, that a deceitful man will always find plenty who are ready to be deceived.

Repetition does not transform a lie into a truth.

A free press can of course be good or bad, but, most certainly, without freedom it will never be anything but bad.

No persons are more frequently wrong, than those who will not admit they are wrong.

Nothing in all the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.

Before mass leaders seize the power to fit reality to their lies, their propaganda is marked by its extreme contempt for facts as such, for in their opinion fact depends entirely on the power of man who can fabricate it.

There is nothing in the record of the past two years when both Houses of Congress have been controlled by the Republican Party which can lead any person to believe that those promises will be fulfilled in the future. They follow the Hitler line—no matter how big the lie; repeat it often enough and the masses will regard it as truth.

Those who corrupt the public mind are just as evil as those who steal from the public purse.

The peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error.

When one with honeyed words but evil mind persuades the mob, great woes befall the state.

Where is there dignity unless there is honesty?

The result of a consistent and total substitution of lies for factual truth is not that the lie will now be accepted as truth and truth be defamed as a lie, but that the sense by which we take our bearings in the real world—and the category of truth versus falsehood is among the mental means to this end—is being destroyed.

Those who are capable of tyranny are capable of perjury to sustain it.

In the end the Party would announce that two and two made five, and you would have to believe it. It was inevitable that they should make that claim sooner or later: the logic of their position demanded it. Not merely the validity of experience, but the very existence of external reality, was tacitly denied by their philosophy. The heresy of heresies was common sense.

It is the privilege of greatness to confer intense happiness with insignificant gifts.

Failure is the true test of greatness.

True greatness is free, kind, familiar, and popular; it lets itself be touched and handled, it loses nothing by being seen at close quarters; the better one knows it, the more one admires it.

To be great is to be misunderstood.

Greatness is a road that leads toward something unknown.

Gratitude is a fruit of great cultivation; you do not find it among gross people.

The widespread interest in gossip is inspired, not by a love of knowledge but by malice: no one gossips about other people’s secret virtues.

Gossip is vice enjoyed vicariously— the sweet, subtle satisfaction without the risk.

Gossip is a sort of smoke that comes from the dirty tobacco-pipes of those who diffuse it; it proves nothing but the bad taste of the smoker.

Gossip is the art-form of the man and woman in the street, and the proper subject for gossip, as for all art, is the behavior of mankind.