False Investigation Quotes

Reverend Don Marxhausen disagreed with all the riffs on Satan. He saw two boys with hate in their eyes and assault weapons in their hands. He saw a society that needed to figure out how and why - fast. Blaming Satan was just letting them off easy, he felt, and copping out on our responsibility to investigate. The "end of days" fantasy was even more infuriating. ~ Dave Cullen

We don't need false hopes or illusions to live happily. ~ Marty Rubin

She taught me not to block out ugliness by giving imagined beauty false dominion: but that on the other hand, in the midst of hatred and ugliness there is color, there is life, and there is ...personal usefullness... as well. ~ Kate McCafferty

Just as you have come to know, the false discrimination of yourself, apply this mentally to all phenomena ~ Gautama Buddha

You don't have to believe in coincidences because they happen every day. The trick is to be able to discern when something is more than coincidence. ~ Glenn Jones

To have chosen the wrong way was the greatest torture I could imagine: to be continually pursuing the end, with it never coming into sight, with every glimmer, drop of water, flash of light a false identifier that something was out there, when the likely path only led to infinite darkness. ~ Richard Heby

Clearly anyone who wants to dismiss Eichmann's testimonies on the grounds of their demonstrated unreliability and shameless self-serving lies can easily do so, and many of my colleagues have done precisely this. But what if our default position is not to dismiss everything Eichmann said and wrote just because he was lying most of the time, but rather to ask what among this mass of lies might nonetheless be of help to the historian, given his unique vantage point and the sheer volume of his testimony?

-- Collected Memories: Holocaust and Postwar Testimony, page 11 ~ Christopher R. Browning

After a number of events, what is there left but repetition and diminishment? Who wants to go on living? The eccentric, the religious, the artistic (sometimes); those with a false sense of their own worth. Soft cheeses collapse; firm cheeses indurate. Both go mouldy. ~ Julian Barnes

Without poetry, religion becomes obscure, false, and malignant; without philosophy, licentious in all wantonness, and lascivious to the point of self-castration. ~ Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

Almost all philosophers, in their ethical systems, first lay down a false doctrine, and then argue that wickedness consists in acting in a manner that proves it false, which would be impossible if the doctrine were true. ~ Bertrand Russell

Hope itself is always genuine. It's only what it's placed in that can prove to be false. ~ Karen Maitland

I had a back-and-forth where I asked Donald Trump, is it true or false that he said the government should pay for everyone's health care? He said it's false. Listen, within minutes, we put out a video just contrasting what he said there with video of him just a few months earlier saying exactly the opposite. ~ Ted Cruz

For faith, as well intentioned as it may be, must be built on facts, not fiction - faith in fiction is a damnable false hope. ~ Thomas A. Edison

It is false to believe that the scale of fears corresponds to that of the dangers which inspire them. One might be frightened of sleeplessness and yet not of a duel, of a rat and not of a lion. ~ Marcel Proust

Man isn't a noble savage, he's an ignoble savage. He is irrational, brutal, weak, silly, unable to be objective about anything where his own interests are involved-that about sums it up. I'm interested in the brutal and violent nature of man because it's a true picture of him. And any attempt to create social institutions on a false view of the nature of man is probably doomed to failure. ~ Stanley Kubrick

Humor distorts nothing, and only false gods are laughed off their earthly pedestals. ~ Agnes Repplier

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

There are no hard distinctions between what is real and what is unreal, nor between what is true and what is false. A thing is not necessarily either true or false; it can be both true and false. ~ Harold Pinter

There is a false ecumenism, as sentimental and vague as you please, which for all intents and purposes abolishes doctrine; in order to reconcile two adversaries, one strangles them both, which is certainly the best way to make peace.
[...]
Objectivity toward the perspectives and spiritual ways of other peoples is too often the result of philosophic indifferentism or sentimental universalism, and in such a case there is no reason to pay it homage; indeed one may well ask whether objectivity in the full sense of the word is really involved. The Christian saint who fights Muslims is closer to Islamic sanctity than the philosopher who accepts everything and practices nothing. ~ Frithjof Schuon

Anyone who has undergone home repair lately knows that your everyday artisan uses language so loosely and makes false promises so glibly as to make your politicians, even the presidential candidate, seem like a model of accuracy and rectitude. 'Be there Wednesday at nine,' the workman will tell you. It is a lie. He is humoring you. He says it to silence you, the way you tell a child you will take it to Disneyland if it will stop crying. ~ Mary McGrory

The process of tracing regularity in any complicated, and at first sight confused, set of appearances, is necessarily tentative; we begin by making any supposition, even a false one, to see what consequences will follow from it ; and by observing how these differ from the real phenomena, we learn what corrections to make in our assumption. ~ John Stuart Mill

Most of the propositions and questions to be found in philosophical works are not false but nonsensical. ~ Ludwig Wittgenstein

The usual false conclusions of mankind are these: a thing exists, therefore it has a right to exist. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

The rumors about me being with Jamal Lewis, Adam Carolla and Tiki Barber are absolutely false. I've never even met Adam or Tiki Barber in person'we did phone interviews. What happens is that a lot of high-profile men saw topless photos of me. ~ Kola Boof

Mark but this flea, and mark in this,
How little that which thou deniest me is;
Me it sucked first, and now sucks thee,
And in this flea our two bloods mingled be;
Thou know'st that this cannot be said
A sin, or shame, or loss of maidenhead,
Yet this enjoys before it woo,
And pampered swells with one blood made of two,
And this, alas, is more than we would do.


Oh stay, three lives in one flea spare,
Where we almost, nay more than married are.
This flea is you and I, and this
Our mariage bed and mariage temple is;
Though parents grudge, and you, we are met,
And cloisterd in these living walls of jet.
Though use make you apt to kill me,
Let not to that, self-murder added be,
And sacrilege, three sins in killing three.


Cruel and sudden, hast thou since
Purpled thy nail in blood of innocence?
Wherein could this flea guilty be,
Except in that drop which it sucked from thee?
Yet thou triumph'st, and say'st that thou
Find'st not thy self, nor me the weaker now;
'Tis true; then learn how false, fears be:
Just so much honor, when thou yield'st to me,
Will waste, as this flea's death took life from thee. ~ John Donne

Some of the burdens we carry include false weight, perhaps to make up for all the horrible stuff we actually did and forgot. ~ David Carr

I think there's a false division people sometimes make in describing literary novels, where there are people who write systems novels, or novels of ideas, and there are people who write about emotional things in which the movement is character driven. But no good novels are divisible in that way. ~ Dana Spiotta

The fool is disturbed not when they tell him that his ideas are false, but when they suggest that they have gone out of style. ~ Nicolas Gomez Davila

THE attention of the writer having been called to the fact that all Indo-Germanic nations have worshipped crucified Saviours, an investigation of the subject was made. Overwhelming proof was obtained that the sun-myths of the ancient Aryans were the origin of the religions in all of the countries which were peopled by the Aryans. The Saviours worshipped in these lands are personifications of the Sun, the chief god of the Aryans. That Pagan nations worshipped a crucified man, was admitted by the Fathers of the early Christian Church. ~ Sarah E. Titcomb

This false and artificial means enforces a state of ennui. ~ Laetitia Sadier

Discerning the merits of competing claims is where the empirical basis of science should play a role. I cannot stress often enough that what science is all about is not proving things to be true but proving them to be false. What fails the test of empirical reality, as determined by observation and experiment, gets thrown out like yesterday's newspaper. ~ Lawrence M. Krauss

How false the most profound book turns out to be when applied to life. ~ William Faulkner

Stress is a false perception of fear of the unknown. ~ Debasish Mridha

Women have been brought up with the false sense that they have all the options in the world. We don't understand that the culture really isn't offering us all of these options – there still are very strong pressures to conform. We have to step outside the culture to be able to make choices that will really give us what we want. But we lack the psychic mechanisms to do this, to really choose. ~ Dalma Heyn

High finance isn't burglary or obtaining money by false pretenses, but rather a judicious selection from the best features of those fine arts. ~ Finley Peter Dunne

Affection! Affection is false. ~ Elizabeth I

By positional play a master tries to prove and exploit true values, whereas by combinations he seeks to refute false values ... A combination produces an unexpected re-assessment of values. ~ Emanuel Lasker

I realize how depraved it was to instill false guilt in an innocent child's conscience, causing a distorted image of life, God, & self, leaving little if any feeling of personal worth. ~ Mary Griffith

I know that we often tremble at an empty terror; yet the false fancy brings a real misery. ~ Friedrich Schiller

Far better that false hope should lull you,
Than that sheer blackness yawn at you ~ Ivan Klima