Aaronovitch False Quotes

Of what violences, murders, depredations, have not the epic poets, from all antiquity, been the occasion, by propagating false honor, false glory, and false religion? ~ Samuel Richardson

2.223 In order to discover whether the picture is true or false we must compare it with reality. 2.224 It cannot be discovered from the picture alone whether it is true or false. 2.225 There is no picture which is a priori true. ~ Ludwig Wittgenstein

In the shadow of feigned cripples and false wounds come the strong arms of thieves and very healthy drunkards. ~ Miguel De Cervantes Saavedra

I learned something recently: our true friends are those are with us when the good things happen. They cheer us on and are pleased by our triumphs. False friends only appear at difficult times, with the sad, supportive faces, when, in fact, our suffering is serving to console them for their miserable lives. When things were bad last year, various people I had never ever seen before turned up to 'console' me. I hate that. ~ Paulo Coelho

When spring came, even the false spring, there were no problems except where to be happiest. ~ Ernest Hemingway,

These false answers such as, I am stone, I am bird, I am animal, I am man, I am woman, I am great, I am small are, in turn, received, tested and discarded until the Question arrives at the right and Final Answer, I AM GOD. ~ Meher Baba

False assurances were certainly more harmful than none at all. ~ Chris Womersley

The goal, Karel said, was not to tell explicit lies but to destroy the distinction between the true and the false, so that lying becomes neither necessary nor possible. ~ Roger Scruton

Sometimes, by celebrating the evangelical heroes of the faith, we have inadvertently communicated something false: if it's not big and audacious and officially sanctioned, it's not good enough for God. ~ Sarah Bessey

I don't look in the mirror; don't like what I see; never have. I am not my idea of a beauty. Never was. This is not false modesty. I've just never been enamoured of my face, which of course is magnified umpteen times on screen. ~ Lauren Bacall

This is something I consider Enlightenment to be - and that is to give intellectual or spiritual understanding and to be free of ignorance, false beliefs or prejudice. Able to honor each person as they walk their own path and not infringe our own personal beliefs onto them but to accept what ever form that carries truth for them ~ Jane Seymour

A twerp was defined as a guy who put his set of false teeth up his rear end and bit the buttons off the backseats of taxicabs. ~ Kurt Vonnegut

I entertain a private suspicion that physical sports were much more really effective and beneficent when they were not taken quite so seriously. One of the first essentials of sport being healthy is that it should be delightful; it is rapidly becoming a false religion with austerities and prostrations. ~ G.K. Chesterton

The atheist staring from his attic window is often nearer to God than the believer caught up in his own false image of God. ~ Martin Buber

Narcissists are consumed with maintaining a shallow false self to others. They're emotionally crippled souls that are addicted to attention. Because of this they use a multitude of games, in order to receive adoration. Sadly, they are the most ungodly of God's creations because they don't show remorse for their actions, take steps to make amends or have empathy for others. They are morally bankrupt. ~ Shannon L. Alder

You, too, will be driven away from your native land and ancient domains as leaves are driven before the wintry storms. Sleep not longer, O Choctaws and Chickasaws, in false security and delusive hopes. Our broad domains are fast escaping from our grasp. ~ Tecumseh

The censor pretends he is protecting tender hearts, shielding children from sex and violence, keeping the righteous in the right path, guarding against temptation, preserving virtue. How? by burning books, tearing out tongues, stretching necks, stoning women; through torture and imprisonment; by threats of violence against the victim's friends and family; by force-feeding his own people a philosophy not only false and wicked now but false and wicked the day it was first announced by some imaginary lord and used to purchase or preserve his privileges and hoodwink the world. ~ William H Gass

And although she'd glibly remarked that you couldn't stand still, was this actually true or was it a hollow axiom as false and misleading as any other trite saying? Why should one not stand still? If the position in which one found oneself standing was a satisfactory and comfortable one? She felt no need, no need at all to move on from being Mma Ramotswe of The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency, wife that great mechanic, Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni. ~ Alexander McCall Smith

The question of relevance comes before that of truth, because to ask whether a statement is true or false presupposes that it is relevant (so that to try to assert the truth or falsity of an irrelevant statement is a form of confusion) ... ~ David Bohm

A story is a largely false account of largely trivial events, fed to us by historians who are largely idiots. ~ Andrzej Sapkowski

Athletes try to get other athletes out and they should have no false starts. ~ Asafa Powell

What is stripped away is not our humanity but our idolatries, not faith but our false hopes, not meaning but out illusions. Dying in order to live. ~ Charles Ringma

I know that mirrors give us a false sense of confidence." I continued. "The reflection that we see everyday has nothing to do with how others see us. The glass lies. ~ Rasmenia Massoud

It is not easy to distinguish between true and false affection, unless there occur one of those crises in which, as gold is tried by fire, so a faithful friendship may be tested by danger. ~ Marcus Tullius Cicero

The Ada could look back on her life and see, like clones, several of her standing there in a line. This terrified her, because if there were so many of her, then which one was she? Were they false and her current self real, or was her current self false and it was one of the others, lost in the line, who was the real Ada? ~ Akwaeke Emezi

When you see things through your heart, there is no right or wrong, true or false, only there is love to share. ~ Debasish Mridha

The auspices for philosophy are bad if, when proceeding ostensibly on the investigation of truth, we start saying farewell to all uprightness, honesty and sincerity, and are intent only on passing ourselves off for what we are not. We then assume, like those three sophists [Fichte, Schelling and Hegel], first a false pathos, then an affected and lofty earnestness, then an air of infinite superiority, in order to impose where we despair of ever being able to convince. ~ Arthur Schopenhauer

the false humility of youth that is itself a sort of pride. It ~ George R R Martin

In his extreme youth Stoner had thought of love as an absolute state of being to which, if one were lucky, one might find access; in his maturity he had decided it was the heaven of a false religion, toward which one ought to gaze with an amused disbelief, a gently familiar contempt, and an embarrassed nostalgia. Now in his middle age he began to know that it was neither a state of grace nor an illusion; he saw it as a human act of becoming, a condition that was invented and modified moment by moment and day by day, by the will and the intelligence and the heart. ~ John Edward Williams

I wiped off my fingers, but it wasn't the mold or maggots making my stomach revolt... No, it was the knowledge that all around me sat empty people in rotting clothes, nibbling on flyblown trifles while they spoke of nothing of consequence with fixed smiles on their false faces. ~ Margaret Rogerson

"Thou shalt not bear false witness" Exodus 20:16. When we speak of morality, we imply that a man is true to his word-true to his signature on a contract. The violations of God's laws are evidence that lying and misrepresentation are not absent from us. ~ Ezra Taft Benson

With Zia's controversial demise in 1988, Jinnah was finally spared the false beard Zia kept pinning on the founder's otherwise clean-shaven face. ~ Nadeem Farooq Paracha

So false is faction, and so smooth a liar,
As that it never had a side entire. ~ Samuel Daniel

It was an alarming thought that these false selves should still have me in their power, and in my bewilderment I began wondering whether any such thing as my real self could be said to exist at all. Like a sudden revelation, then, it became clear to me that the self was always changing, always developing, only capable of evolving fully through the integration of all past semblances. I wouldn't be my true self till I accepted and learned to know all those selves I'd disowned and deserted...As if this were something I could do consciously, there and then, the last of my inertia vanished, consumed by an ardent desire for identification with the essential 'I' – until this had been achieved I'd always be as I was now, wandering like a stranger, lost, frightened and confused, among the changes and contradictions of my own personality. ~ Anna Kavan

For all this talk about us being a nation at war with child abuse, and for all the media hype about witch-hunts and false allegations - and don't ever let anyone use the word witch-hunts about this; there were no witches - the fact remains that in 1994, it is extremely difficult to come forward with allegations of sexual abuse. And the external forces of denial are almost overwhelming. If a case as verified as mine meets with denial, I dread to think about the experience of people who don't have the kind of corroboration that I do. And I really worry that we're getting close to a point where it's going to be impossible to prosecute child molesters, because we don't believe children, and now we don't believe adults. (Cheit "Paper presented at the Mississippi Statewide Conference on Child Abuse and Neglect" Jackson, April 29 1994.) ~ Ross Cheit

Patriarchy doesn't get yet that 'hope' is a powerful force that drives creativity. Otherwise words like 'false' and 'hope' would never be forced into this unconscious coupling....Hope is not false. And never has been... Rather, hope is part of the often forgotten feminine contribution to the creative process. ~ Deirdre Morris

To lessen your fear and regard to the opinion of the world, think how soon the world will disregard you, and have no more thought or concern about you, than about the poorest animal that died in a ditch ... Is it therefore worth your while to lose the smallest degree of virtue, for the sake of pleasing so bad a master, and so false a friend, as the world is? ~ William Law

The United States of America, justifiably and proudly, went to war in Afghanistan in early winter of 2001. The United States invaded Iraq on a false premise in the spring of 2003. ~ Mike Barnicle

You told me," I said, "that I should turn this house into a boardinghouse for students. Well, there are better things I could do with it. I could turn it into a haven for beggars. I could run a soup kitchen and a dormitory. But I don't. Why not? Because the spirit of charity has perished in this country. Because those who accept charity despise it, while those who give give with a despairing heart. What is the point of charity when it does not go from heart to heart? What do you think charity is? Soup? Money? Charity: from the Latin word for the heart. It is as hard to receive as to give. it takes as much effort. I wish you would learn that. I wish you would learn something instead of just lying around."

A lie: charity, caritas, has nothing to do with the heart. But what does it matter if my sermons rest on false etymologies? He barely listens when i speak to him. Perhaps, despite those keen bird-eyes, he is more befuddled with drink than I know. Or perhaps, finally, he does not care. Care: the true root of charity. I look for him to care, and he does not. Because he is beyond caring. Beyond caring and beyond care ~ J.M. Coetzee

Those whose spiritual awareness has been awakened never make a false move. They don't have to avoid evil. They are so replete with love that whatever they do is a good action. They are fully conscious that they are not the doer of their actions, but only servants of God. ~ Ramakrishna

I think and think for months and years. Ninety-nine times, the conclusion is false. The hundredth time I am right. ~ Albert Einstein