Falsification Quotes

....the line of ill-intentional Egyptologist, equipped with a ferocious erudition , have commited their well known crime against science, by becoming guilty of a deliberate falsification of the history of humanity.
Supported by the governing powers of all the Western countries , this ideology, based on a moral and intellectual swindle, easily won out over the true scientific current developed by a parallel group of Egyptologist of good will, whose intellectual uprightness and even courage cannot be stressed stronly enough.
The new Egyptological ideology , born at the opportune monment, reinforced the theorectical bases of imperialist ideology. That is why it easily drowned out the voice of science, by throwing the veil of fasificacation over historical truth. This ideology was spread with the help of considerable publicity and taught the world over, because it alone had the material and financial means for its own propagation.
Thus imperialism, like the prehistoric hunter, first killed the being spiritually and culturally, before trying to eliminate it physically. The negation of the history and intellectual accomplishments of Black Africans was cultural, mental murder,which preceded and paved the way for their genocide here and there in the world. ~ Cheikh Anta Diop

Psychoanalysis is essentially a theory of unconscious strivings, of resistance, of falsification of reality according to one's subjective needs and expectations. ~ Erich Fromm

Once more the priestly instinct of the Jew perpetrated
the same old master crime against history--he simply struck out the yesterday and the day before yesterday of Christianity, and invented his own history of Christian beginnings. Going further, he treated the history of Israel to another falsification, so that it became a mere prologue to his achievement: all the prophets, it now appeared, had referred to his "Saviour."... Later on the church even falsified the history of man in order to make it a prologue to Christianity. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

There certainly is a tension between the relativity of simultaneity and non-locality in quantum theory, but it's not strong enough to add up to a falsification of either side by itself. ~ Lee Smolin

From the totalitarian point of view history is something to be created rather than learned. A totalitarian state is in effect a theocracy, and its ruling caste, in order to keep its position, has to be thought of as infallible. But since, in practice, no one is infallible, it is frequently necessary to rearrange past events in order to show that this or that mistake was not made, or that this or that imaginary triumph actually happened. Then again, every major change in policy demands a corresponding change of doctrine and a revelation of prominent historical figures. This kind of thing happens everywhere, but is clearly likelier to lead to outright falsification in societies where only one opinion is permissible at any given moment. Totalitarianism demands, in fact, the continuous alteration of the past, and in the long run probably demands a disbelief in the very existence of objective truth. ~ George Orwell

Already we know almost literally nothing about the Revolution and the
years before the Revolution. Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book has been rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street and building has been
renamed, every date has been altered. And that process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right. I know, of course, that the past is falsified, but it would never be possible for me to prove it,
even when I did the falsification myself. After the thing is done, no evidence ever remains. The only
evidence is inside my own mind, and I don't know with any certainty that any other human being shares my memories. ~ George Orwell

Man must learn to simplify, but not to the point of falsification. ~ Aldous Huxley

Here we live in the illusion of happiness where we forget that we were created to handle the balance not just to bear it. We brought into being from nothingness not to live in deep wells of subconscious and be satisfied on the echoes of the convoys we came to hear. We are here to spread the wings of happiness, purposefully built in within ourselves to come out from the wells of our falsification of self and bring forth the real us ... . The ones with compassion, kindness and self- esteem shaping in perfection the most gifted creation of the most powerful creator and to become part of these immortal convoys for the times to come. ~ Annie Ali

A good scientific law or theory is falsifiable just because it makes definite claims about the world. For the falsificationist, If follows fairly readily from this that the more falsifiable a theory is the better, in some loose sense of more. The more a theory claims, the more potential opportunities there will be for showing that the world does not in fact behave in the way laid down by the theory. A very good theory will be one that makes very wide-ranging claims about the world, and which is consequently highly falsifiable, and is one that resists falsification whenever it is put to the test. ~ Alan F. Chalmers

I speak of the current civilization and I consider her not as a symbol but as victim-victim, really, of the commercialization, of the falsification of this real world. That is my theme. ~ Ernesto Cardenal

the nature of animal consciousness is such that the world we can be conscious of is only a world of surfaces and signs, a world generalized, made common - that everything that becomes conscious thereby becomes flat, thin, relatively stupid, general, a sign, a herd signal; that all coming to conscious involves a vast and thoroughgoing corruption, falsification, superficialization, and generalization. Heightened ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

All history was a palimpsest, scraped clean and re-inscribed exactly as often as was necessary. In no case would it have been possible, once the deed was done, to prove that any falsification had taken place. ~ George Orwell

The only ethical principle which has made science possible is that the truth shall be told all the time. If we do not penalize false statements made in error, we open up the way for false statements by intention. And a false statement of fact, made deliberately, is the most serious crime a scientist can commit. ~ Dorothy L. Sayers

Praxeology is a theoretical and systematic, not a historical, science. Its scope is human action as such, irrespective of all environmental, accidental, and individual circumstances of the concrete acts. Its cognition is purely formal and general without reference to the material content and the particular features of the actual case. It aims at knowledge valid for all instances in which the conditions exactly correspond to those implied in its assumptions and inferences. Its statements and propositions are not derived from experience. They are, like those of logic and mathematics, a priori. They are not subject to verification or falsification on the ground of experience and facts. ~ Ludwig Von Mises

Lying is a deliberate choice to mislead a target without giving any notification of the intent to do so. There are two major forms of lying: concealment, leaving out true information; and falsification, or presenting false information as if it were true. ~ Paul Ekman

The timed email bombs of the 2016 presidential campaign were also a powerful form of disinformation. Words written in one situation make sense only in that context. The very act of removing them from their historical moment and dropping them in another is an act of falsification. What is worse, when media followed the email bombs as if they were news, they betrayed their own mission. ~ Timothy Snyder

It is obvious that the concept of truth has become suspect. Of course it is correct that is has been much abused. Intolerance and cruelty have occurred in the name of truth. To that extent people are afraid when someone says, "This is the truth", or even "I have the truth". We never have it, at best is has us. No one will dispute that one must be careful and cautious in claiming the truth. But simply to dismiss it as unattainable is really destructive.
(...) We must have the courage to dare to say: Yes, man must seek the truth; he is capable of truth. It goes without saying that truth requires criteria for verification and falsification. It must always be accompanied by tolerance, also. But then truth also points out to us those constant values which have made mankind great. That is why the humility to recognize the truth and to accept it as a standard has to be relearned and practiced again.
The truth comes to rule, not through violence, but rather through its own power; this is the central theme of John's Gospel: When brought before Pilate, Jesus professes that he himself is The Truth and the witness to the truth. He does not defend the truth with legions but rather makes it visible through his Passion and thereby also implements it. ~ Benedict XVI

Every test of a theory, whether resulting in its corroboration or falsification, must stop at some basic statement or other which we decide to accept. If we do not come to any decision, and do not accept some basic statement or other, then the test will have led nowhere. But considered from a logical point of view, the situation is never such that it compels us to stop at this particular basic statement rather than at that, or else give up the test altogether. For any basic statement can again in its turn be subjected to tests, using as a touchstone any of the basic statements which can be deduced from it with the help of some theory, either the one under test, or another. This procedure has no natural end. ~ Karl Popper

Writing always means hiding something in such a way that it then is discovered; because the truth that can come from my pen is like a shard that has been chipped from a great boulder by a violent impact, then flung far away; because there is no certitude outside falsification. ~ Italo Calvino

We're constantly correcting, and correcting ourselves, most rigorously, because we recognize at every moment that we did it all wrong (wrote it, thought it, made it all wrong), acted all wrong, how we acted all wrong, that everything to this point in time is a falsification, so we correct this falsification, and then we again correct the correction of this falsification and we correct the result of the correction of a correction andsoforth. ~ Thomas Bernhard

I myself was to experience how easily one is taken in by a lying and censored press and radio in a totalitarian state ... a steady diet over the years of falsifications and distortions made a certain impression on one's mind and often misled it. ~ William L. Shirer

This then, I thought, as I looked round about me, is the representation of history. It requires a falsification of perspective. We, the survivors, see everything from above, see everything at once, and still we do not know how it was. ~ W.G. Sebald

If lying and fabrication are psychologically harmful even in ordinary relations with other men (a sphere where a certain amount of falsification is not uncommon) all falsity is disastrous in any relation with the ground of our own being ~ Thomas Merton

How much better life seemed to me now that it seemed susceptible of being illuminated, taken out of the shadows, restored from our ceaseless falsification of it to the truth of what it was, in short, realized in a book! How happy the writer of a book like that would be, I thought, what a labour awaited him! ~ Marcel Proust

The idea that Americans favor politicians who either remind them of themselves or can imagine what their selves are like because they too have struggled and sung the blues, is, like very best theories of human behavior, immune to falsification by mere evidence. ~ Walter Kirn

With your ego you cannot know. Only in an egolessness, in a deep abyss, in the absence of the ego, does the perception happen - then you become a mirror. With the ego you will always interpret, you cannot know the truth. With the ego you will always be there interpreting in subtle ways, and your interpretation is not the truth. You are the medium of all falsification. Through you everything becomes false. When you are not there, the true reflects. ~ Rajneesh

For us, the falsity of a judgment is still no objection to that judgment - that's where our new way of speaking sounds perhaps most strange. The question is the extent to which it makes demands on life, sustains life, maintains the species, perhaps even creates species. And as a matter of principle we are ready to assert that the falsest judgments (to which a priori synthetic judgments belong) are the most indispensable to us, that without our allowing logical fictions to count, without a way of measuring reality against the purely invented world of the unconditional and self-identical, without a constant falsification of the world through numbers, human beings could not live - that if we managed to give up false judgments, it would amount to a renunciation of life, a denial of life.

To concede the fictional nature of the conditions of life means, of course, taking a dangerous stand against the customary feelings about value. A philosophy which dares to do that is for this reason alone already standing beyond good and evil. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

The theories of the social sciences do not consist of "laws" in the sense of empirical rules about the behavior of objects definable in physical terms. All that the theory of the social sciences attempts is to provide a technique of reasoning which assists us in connecting individual facts, but which, like logic or mathematics, is not about the facts. It can, therefore, and this is the second point, never be verified or falsified by reference to facts. ~ Friedrich Hayek

True knowledge is that which consists in the doctrine of the apostles, and the ancient constitution of the Church throughout all the world, and the distinctive manifestation of the body of Christ according to the successions of the bishops, by which they have handed down that Church which exists in every place, and has come even unto us, being guarded and preserved without any forging of Scriptures, by a very complete system of doctrine, and neither receiving addition nor [suffering] curtailment [in the truths which she believes]; and [it consists in] reading [the word of God] without falsification, and a lawful and diligent exposition in harmony with the Scriptures, both without danger and without blasphemy; and [above all] it consists in] the pre-eminent gift of love, which is more precious than knowledge, more glorious than prophecy, and which excels all the other gifts [of God[. ~ Irenaus

Clearly, an open mind is a necessity when dealing with randomness. Popper believed that any idea of Utopia is necessarily closed owing to the fact that it chokes its own refutations. The simple notion of a good model for society that cannot be left open for falsification is totalitarian. I learned from Popper, in addition to the difference between an open and a closed society, that between an open and a closed mind. ~ Nassim Nicholas Taleb

The great educational value of the war against Christendom lies in the absolute truthlessness of the priest. Such purity is rare enough. The 'man of God' is entirely incapable of honesty, and only arises at the point where truth is defaced beyond all legibility. Lies are his entire metabolism, the air he breathes, his bread and his wine. He cannot comment upon the weather without a secret agenda of deceit. No word, gesture, or perception is slight enough to escape his extravagant reflex of falsification, and of the lies in circulation he will instinctively seize on the grossest, the most obscene and oppressive travesty. Any proposition passing the lips of a priest is necessarily totally false, excepting only insidiouses whose message is momentarily misunderstood. It is impossible to deny him without discovering some buried fragment or reality. ~ Nick Land

The dark leaden mask hides the devil with a soul of deceit, with his warm syrupy vacuous words coercing, enticing and grasping with exposed sharpened claws, scratching slow at his prey's surface with bullet pointed precision, inserting the slow hot mercurial poison of falsification of love straight into the flowing veins of the succumbing vulnerable heart. The prey's wanton escape futile, isolated & drawn into the hot fiery abyss. ~ Alison Blackmore

In past ages, a war, almost by definition, was something that sooner or later came to an end, usually in unmistakable victory or defeat. In the past, also, war was one of the main instruments by which human societies were kept in touch with physical reality. All rulers in all ages have tried to impose a false view of the world upon their followers, but they could not afford to encourage any illusion that tended to impair military efficiency. So long as defeat meant the loss of independence, or some other result generally held to be undesirable, the precautions against defeat had to be serious. Physical facts could not be ignored. In philosophy, or religion, or ethics, or politics, two and two might make five, but when one was designing a gun or an aeroplane they had to make four. Inefficient nations were always conquered sooner or later, and the struggle for efficiency was inimical to illusions. Moreover, to be efficient it was necessary to be able to learn from the past, which meant having a fairly accurate idea of what had happened in the past. Newspapers and history books were, of course, always coloured and biased, but falsification of the kind that is practiced today would have been impossible. War was a sure safeguard of sanity, and so far as the ruling classes were concerned it was probably the most important of all safeguards. While wars could be won or lost, no ruling class could be completely irresponsible. ~ George Orwell

It is the rule which says that the other rules of scientific procedure must be designed in such a way that they do not protect any statement in science against falsification. ~ Karl Popper

Everybody knows how fallible memory can sometimes be. You remember certain fragments precisely, but as soon as you try to join the fragments together, for a story, there is a certain - not falsification, but a shifting. ~ Gunter Grass

Life, it is true, is a process of decisions and alternatives, the conscious awareness and acceptance of limitations. Experience, nevertheless, to say nothing of history, seems clearly to indicate that it is not possible to banish or to falsify any human need without ourselves undergoing falsification and loss. ~ James Baldwin

sacred is the task of the artist when he undertakes to paint the life of the People. Falsification here is far more pernicious than in the more artificial aspects of life. ~ George Eliot

Once the process of falsification is set in motion, it won't stop. We're in a country where everything that can be falsified has been falsified: paintings in museums, gold ingots, bus tickets. The counterrevolution and the revolution fight with salvos of falsification: the result is that nobody can be sure what is true and what is false, the political police simulate revolutionary actions and the revolutionaries disguise themselves as policemen."

And who gains by it, in the end?"

It's too soon to say. We have to see who can best exploit the falsifications, their own and those of the others: whether it's the police or our organization."

The taxi driver is pricking up his ears. You motion Corinna to restrain herself from making unwise remarks.

But she says, "Don't be afraid. This is a fake taxi. What really alarms me, though, is that there is another taxi following us."

Fake or real?"

Fake, certainly, but I don't know whether it belongs to the police or to us. ~ Italo Calvino

See that the mind is honest, first; the rest may follow or not as God wills. [That] the fundamental treason to the mind ... is the one fundamental treason which the scholar's mind must not allow is the bond uniting all the Oxford people in the last resort. ~ Dorothy L. Sayers

Now, must she admit that he individual was an illusion and a falsification? There was no such animal. Except in the mechanical world. In the world of machines, the individual machine is effectual. The individual, like the perfect being, does not and cannot exist, in the vivid world. We are all fragments. And at the best, halves. The only whole thing is the Morning Star. Which can only rise between two: or between many. ~ D.H. Lawrence

24. O sancta simplicitas! In what strange simplification and falsification man lives! One can never cease wondering when once one has got eyes for beholding this marvel! How we have made everything around us clear and free and easy and simple! ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

You'd think (losing his job and degree for having made false claims as a researcher) would be a lesson to him," said Miss Hillyard. "It didn't pay, did it? Say he sacrificed his professional honour for the women and children we hear so much about
but in the end it left him worse of."
But that," said Peter, "was only because he committed the extra sin of being found out. ~ Dorothy L. Sayers

Astrologers were greatly impressed, and misled, by what they believed to be confirming evidence-so much so that they were quite unimpressed by any unfavorable evidence. Moreover, by making their interpretations and prophecies sufficiently vague they were able to explain away anything that might have been a refutation of the theory had the theory and the prophecies been more precise. In order to escape falsification they destroyed the testability of their theory. It is a typical soothsayer's trick to predict things so vaguely that the predictions can hardly fail: that they become irrefutable. ~ Karl Popper

When people want to be rid of Heaven it is logical to start by creating an atmosphere in which spiritual things appear out of place; in order to be able to declare successfully that God is unreal they have to construct around man a false reality, a reality that is inevitably inhuman because only the inhuman can exclude God. What is involved is a falsification of the imagination and so its destruction. ~ Frithjof Schuon

Poetry is an ethic. By ethic I mean a secret code of behavior, a discipline constructed and conducted according to the capabilities of a man who rejects the falsifications of the categorical imperative. ~ Jean Cocteau

Power is all. Another falsification; I do not tell how I gain or maintain it. I only record the ginger stroll through the vaguely fetid garden of its rewards. ~ Samuel R. Delany

... but any writer who adopts the totalitarian outlook, who finds excuses for persecution and the falsification of reality, thereby destroys himself as a writer. There is no way out of this. No tirades against 'individualism' and 'the ivory tower', no pious platitudes to the effect that 'true individuality is only attained through identification with the community', can get over the fact that a bought mind is a spoiled mind ~ George Orwell

The Gospels were written in such temporal and geographical proximity to the events they record that it would have been almost impossible to fabricate events. Anyone who cared to could have checked out the accuracy of what they reported. The fact that the disciples were able to proclaim the resurrection in Jerusalem in the face of their enemies a few weeks after the crucifixion shows that what they proclaimed was true, for they could never have proclaimed the resurrection under such circumstances had it not occurred.

The Gospels could not have been corrupted without a great outcry on the part of orthodox Christians. Against the idea that there could have been a deliberate falsifying of the text, no one could have corrupted all the manuscripts. Moreover, there is no precise time when the falsification could have occurred, since, as we have seen, the New Testament books are cited by the church fathers in regular and close succession. The text could not have been falsified before all external testimony, since then the apostles were still alive and could repudiate any such tampering with the Gospels.

The miracles of Jesus were witnessed by hundreds of people, friends and enemies alike; that the apostles had the ability to testify accurately to what they saw; that the apostles were of such doubtless honesty and sincerity as to place them above suspicion of fraud; that the apostles, though of low estate, nevertheless had comfort and life itself to lose in pro ~ William Lane Craig

We are effectively destroying ourselves by violence masquerading as love. ~ R.D. Laing

At the behest of the criterion of authenticity, much that was once thought to make up the very fabric of culture has come to seem of little account, mere fantasy or ritual, or downright falsification. Conversely, much that culture traditionally condemned and sought to exclude is accorded a considerable moral authority by reason of the authenticity claimed for it, for example, disorder, violence, unreason. ~ Lionel Trilling

Articulation! There, by Joe, was MY absolute, if I could be said to have one. At any rate, it is the only thing I can think of about which I ever had, with any frequency at all, the feelings one usually has for one's absolutes. To turn experience into speech - that is, to classify, to categorize, to conceptualize, to grammarize, to syntactify it - is always a betrayal of experience, a falsification of it; but only so betrayed can it be dealt with at all, and only in so dealing with it did I ever feel a man, alive and kicking. ~ John Barth

The falsification of scientific data or analysis is always a serious matter. ~ Ed Markey

I can now rejoice even in the falsification of a cherished theory, because even this is a scientific success. ~ John Carew