Misleading Quotes

It is a fearful mistake for us to neglect the study of the Bible to investigate theories that are misleading, diverting minds from the words of Christ to fallacies of human production. ~ Ellen G. White

The real world of American society is one which it is very misleading to call simply a democracy. Of course, it is in a sense a democracy, but it is one in which there are enormous inequities in the distribution of power and force. For example, the entire commercial and industrial system is in principle excluded from the democratic process, including everything that goes on within it ~ Noam Chomsky

It is beautiful to acquire knowledge, but it is misleading to expect it to bring us peace, love and happiness. ~ Ken Keyes Jr.

I don't like the term 'global warming,' because it's misleading. It implies something that's mainly about temperature, that's gradual, and that's uniform across the planet. And in fact, temperature is only one of the things that's changing. ~ John Holdren

How often misused words generate misleading thoughts. ~ Herbert Spencer

I'm not claiming to be sober. I think that that would be misleading. I drink alcohol. My father has a vineyard, and the wine is really delicious, by the way. ~ Fergie

American tax dollars spent on education are meant to support students, not support aggressive, deceptive, and misleading marketing campaigns by certain for-profit education companies. ~ Sherrod Brown

What I often forget about students, especially undergraduates, is that surface appearances are misleading. Most of them are at base as conventional as Presbyterian deacons. ~ Muriel Beadle

Islam will be destroyed by the mistakes of scholars, the arguments of the hypocrites who misinterpret the Qur'an to support their views and misleading rulers. ~ Umar

Talc: You have been found guilty of misleading and perverting the young. I decree that you be
hung by your underdeveloped testicles until dead. ZORRO ~ John Kennedy Toole

Judging a person's maturity by the number of years they've lived is misleading. This is because people mature at different rates. ~ Innocent Mwatsikesimbe

When the Bible used that very expression about fighting with principalities and powers and depraved hypersomatic beings at great heights (our translation is very misleading at that point, by the way) it meant that quite ordinary people were to do the fighting. ~ C.S. Lewis

In a court of law,' he said at last 'a witness takes his oath to speak the truth: his own truth, that is. He agrees to two parameters. His testimony must be the whole truth, and his testimony must be nothing but the truth. Only the second of these parameters is a true limit. The first, of course, is largely a matter of discretion. When we say the whole truth we mean, more precisely, all the facts and impressions that are pertinent to the matter at hand. All that is impertinent is not only immaterial; it is, in many cases, deliberately misleading. Gentlemen, [...] I contend that there are no whole truths, there are only pertinent truths----and pertinence, you must agree, is always a matter of perspective. I do not believe that any of you has perjured himself in any way tonight. I trust that you have given me the truth, and nothing but the truth. But your perspectives are very many, and you will forgive me if I do not take your tale for something whole. ~ Eleanor Catton

You are all misleading one another, and are yourselves deceived. The sun does not go round the
earth, but the earth goes round the sun, revolving as it
goes, and turning towards the sun in the course of each
twenty-four hours, not only Japan, and the Philippines,
and Sumatra where we now are, but Africa, and Europe,
and America, and many lands besides. The sun does not
shine for some one mountain, or for some one island,
or for some one sea, nor even for one earth alone, but
for other planets as well as our earth. If you would
only look up at the heavens, instead of at the ground
beneath your own feet, you might all understand this,
and would then no longer suppose that the sun shines
for you, or for your country alone. ~ Leo Tolstoy

Why did popular songs always focus on romantic love? Why this preoccupation with first meetings, sad partings, honeyed kisses, heartbreak, when life was also full of children's births and trips to the shore and longtime jokes with friends? Once Maggie had seen on TV where archaeologists had just unearthed a fragment of music from who knows how many centuries B.C., and it was a boys lament for a girl who didn't love him back. Then besides the songs there were the magazine stories and the novels and the movies, even the hair-spray ads and the pantyhose ads. It struck Maggie as disproportionate. Misleading, in fact. ~ Anne Tyler

To be acknowledged that we do not believe in their misleading notion and fallacy, today, tomorrow and forever even if it costs us our life. They have suffocated people for hundreds of years and if we don't stop them today no one else would do it tomorrow. ~ M.F. Moonzajer

Incase the title was misleading, this is the story of Qorth. He was an alien, but he was more normal, more boring, more goofy, and more ho-hum than any human I'd ever known . . . to the point that I sometimes wonder if he was really even an alien. To be fair, he did have "magical" otherworldly powers and some weird traits, like pointed ears. It rained when he was sad. His eyes were solid black, which really creeped me out in the beginning but, eh, I got used to it. He had weird tastes in food, like he would put ketchup on pancakes, and animals were sock puppets to him. The night I found him, it was the animals who led me to him. ~ Ash Gray

A woman's judgment: intuitive, clever, expressed with felicitous charm - infallible. A judgment that has nothing to do with justice. The critic and the judge seems to think that in those distant lands all joy is a yell and a war dance, all pathos is a howl and a ghastly grin of filed teeth, and that the solution of all problems is found in the barrel of a revolver or on the point of an assegai. And yet it is not so. But the erring magistrate may plead in excuse the misleading nature of the evidence. ~ Joseph Conrad

If you destroy the credibility of those people or institutions that could undermine your own, you create an opportunity for your voice, however irresponsible or misleading it may be, to gain traction. ~ John Yarmuth

Bill Clinton was impeached primarily for criminal conduct: lying under oath and misleading a federal grand jury about his affair with Monica Lewinsky. Nixon would have been impeached for a wide array of criminal acts, as well as abuses of power. ~ Jonathan Turley

As a former Republican, I represent a group of Americans who all too often have no one to speak for them. This group doesn't necessarily have a name. We've been called 'moderates,' but that term can be misleading. ~ Lincoln Chafee

Big actions, in our system of checks and balances, require approval by Congress and have to pass constitutional muster by the Supreme Court, and some powers are reserved to the states. So this overused "czar" word is a little misleading. But the things America ought to do should include the following: ~ Denis Hayes

Nothing is as misleading as time – just think about it and you've already
gotten old. ~ Eraldo Banovac

I'm so reluctant to do newspaper interviews because it's so misleading how they interpret what you say. ~ Davy Jones

Obsolete misleading theologies bear the same relation to the essence of true religion that scarlet fever, mumps, and measles do to education. ~ Luther Burbank

We must start with scientific fundamentals, and that means with the data of experiments and not with assumed axioms predicated only upon the misleading nature of that which only superficially seems to be obvious. It is the consensus of great scientists that science is the attempt to set in order the facts of experience. ~ R. Buckminster Fuller

The claims made about Iraq's WMD capabilities before the invasion were inaccurate, wrong, and in some cases, deliberately misleading. ~ Colin Powell

The word philosophy, as distinguished from science, is misleading, for it implies that what philosophy contains is impossible to be a systematic body of knowledge and what science contains is certain or proved. ~ Kedar Joshi

Calling China's online censorship system a 'Great Firewall' is increasingly trendy, but misleading. All walls, being the creation of engineers, can be breached with the right tools. ~ Evgeny Morozov

Lyrics are always misleading because they make people think that that's what the music is about. ~ Brian Eno

Ardour in well-doing is a misleading and a treacherous thing. It cries out loudly for employment; you can't satisfy it at first; it wants more and more; it is eager to move mountains and divert the course of rivers. It isn't content till it perspires. And then, too often, when it feels the perspiration on its brow, it wearies all of a sudden and dies, without even putting itself to the trouble of saying, I've had enough of this. ~ Arnold Bennett

The war has ended with every one owing every one else immense sums of money. Germany owes a large sum to the Allies, the Allies owe a large sum to Great Britain, and Great Britain owes a large sum to the United States. The holders of war loan in every country are owed a large sum by the States, and the States in its turn is owed a large sum by these and other taxpayers. The whole position is in the highest degree artificial, misleading, and vexatious. We shall never be able to move again, unless we can free our limbs from these paper shackles. ~ John Maynard Keynes

The argument that personal moral views should not be imposed on others when it comes to lawmaking is incoherent and misleading. It is incoherent because a great deal of law implicitly "imposes" a particular moral view on the wider society. It would be disingenuous to pretend that the legalization of abortion on demand or euthanasia does not impose a certain moral view on the rest of society. This is especially true when arguments for abortion and euthanasia are based on rights. The appeal to rights is a moral argument, and it is this appeal to moral authority that gives force to laws enshrining rights. ~ George Cardinal Pell

The idea of protoplasm, which was really a name for our ignorance, [is] only a little less misleading than the expression "Vital force". ~ John B. S. Haldane

Milo looked into Sariel's expressionless face and sighed. "I'm not misleading
her," he objected. "When I said that I would never leave her side, I meant it."
"But you know that's not possible," Sariel contradicted gently. "You envy those
who are going to take your place. Envy leads to strife and strife leads to death, Warden.
It's not a good place to be. Perhaps you should learn to be truthful to yourself? ~ Megan Dent Nagle

The whole concept of European culture as a cornucopia from which things are freely given is misleading. It does not take a specialist in anthropology to see that the European "give" is always highly selective. We never give any native people under our control – and we never shall, for it would be sheer folly as long as we stand on the basis of our present Realpolitik – the following elements of culture:

1. The instruments of physical power: fire-arms, bombing planes, poison gas, and all that makes an effective defence or aggression possible
2. We do not give out instruments of political mastery [i.e. sovereignty or voting rights]
3. We do not share with them the substance of economic wealth and advantages…. Even when under indirect economic exploitation… we allow the native a share of the profits, the full control of the economic organization remains in the hands of Western enterprise.
4. We do not admit them as equals to Church, Assembly, school, or drawing room… Full political, social and even religious equality is nowhere granted. ~ Bronisław Malinowski

Words are not cubicles for truth telling. Words do not allow us to touch the face of God or define the contours of the soul. Words are imprecise and cannot capture all aspects of reality or replicate all facets of a person's emotional mélange. Language allows for limited explorations of reality and minimal probing of the human mind. I accept that the only possible relation between language and the world is the image displayed in each person's head by the picture invoking ability of language. Select word pictures might accurately portray what I perceive and still be vague, blatantly inaccurate, completely meaningless, misleading, distorted, or incomprehensible in other persons' minds. ~ Kilroy J. Oldster

To say that the United States has pursued diplomacy with North Korea is a little bit misleading. It did under the Clinton administration, though neither side completely lived up to their obligations. Clinton didn't do what was promised, nor did North Korea, but they were making progress. ~ Noam Chomsky

Let us be charitable, and call it a misleading feature ~ Larry Wall

The good news, however, is that the self also has made reason and scientific observation possible, and reason and science, in turn, have been gradually correcting the misleading intuitions prompted by the unaided self. Overcoming ~ Antonio R Damasio

As soon as you start doing that - changing things - it seems self-evident to me that you've entered the world of make-believe. If you pretend that it's true, and use your own name, you are misleading people. Fiction is looser and wilder and sometimes in the end more self-revealing, anyway. ~ Nicholson Baker

Conventional wisdom, fooled by our misleading "physical intuition", is that the real world is continuous, and that discrete models are necessary evils for approximating the "real" world, due to the innate discreteness of the digital computer. ~ Doron Zeilberger

There is a misleading, unwritten rule that states if a quote giving advice comes from someone famous, very old, or Greek, then it must be good advice. ~ Bo Bennett

The phrase "In the blink of an eye" is misleading, because one eye closing and opening is not a blink - it's a wink. ~ Jarod Kintz

We're in the same position as any scientist. All we have to go on is experiential evidence. And sooner or later we have to trust our own experience, because that's all we really have. Otherwise it's a vicious circle. If I fundamentally distrust my experience, then I must distrust even my capacity to distrust, since that is also an experience. So sooner or later I have no choice but to trust, trust my experience, trust that the universe is not fundamentally and persistently going to lie to me. Of course we can be mistaken, and sometimes experiences are misleading, but on balance we have no choice but to follow them. It's a type of phenomenological imperative. And especially mystical experiences - if anything, as you say, they are more real, not less real, than other experiences. I ~ Ken Wilber

Part of what we're trying to do is lay out what really happened. For example, I've been trying to get across that the intelligence leadership did not just keep the country in the dark. They actively misled the country on key issues. When you have someone who heads the NSA saying we don't hold data at all on US citizens, that's one of the most misleading statements I believe that's ever been made about surveillance policy. And I think that now we're starting to get that message across. ~ Ron Wyden

For centuries before Google, MIT, and IDEO, modern hotbeds of innovation, we struggled to explain any kind of creation, from the universe itself to the multitudes of ideas around us. While we can make atomic bombs, and dry-clean silk ties, we still don't have satisfying answers for simple questions like: Where do songs come from? Are there an infinite variety of possible kinds of cheese? How did Shakespeare and Stephen King invent so much, while we're satisfied watching sitcom reruns? Our popular answers have been unconvincing, enabling misleading, fantasy-laden myths to grow strong. ~ Scott Berkun

Fletcher Von Pein was one of the twelve founders of the Omega Agency. He was also a powerful banker and a majority shareholder in the US Federal Reserve which, despite its misleading name, had zero government ownership and was actually a private corporation owned by the global elite. ~ James Morcan

The yogi
tends to work inwardly, focusing on the body, whereas the magus directs the will
outwardly upon the objects of the greater world. This apparent distinction is misleading,
since inner world and outer world have no dividing boundary, but are an
indivisible universe perceived by a single human mind. The ultimate goal is similar
in both practices-to master the personal universe and yoke it to the higher aspirations. ~ Donald Tyson

The statistical method shows the facts in the light of the ideal average but does not give us a picture of their empirical reality. While reflecting an indisputable aspect of reality, it can falsify the actual truth in a most misleading way. This is particularly true of theories which are based on statistics. The distinctive thing about real facts, however, is their individuality. Not to put too fine a point on it, once could say that the real picture consists of nothing but exceptions to the rule, and that, in consequence, absolute reality has predominantly the character of irregularity. ~ C. G. Jung

Liberalism is essentially the belief that there can be a reconciliation of all difficulties and differences, and since there can't, it is a misleading way to approach politics. ~ Maurice Cowling

I think [James] Joyce sometimes enjoyed misleading his readers. He said to me that history was like that parlor game where someone whispers something to the person next to him, who repeats it not very distinctly to the next person, and so on until, by the time the last person hears it, it comes out completely transformed. Of course, as he explained to me, the meaning in Finnegans Wake is obscure because it is a 'nightpiece.' I think, too, that, like the author's sight, the work is often blurred. ~ Sylvia Beach

[Herbert] Hoover, had he been challenged with the overpowering implausibility of his notion that economic life is a race that is won by the ablest runner, would have had a ready answer from his own biography: had he not started in life as a poor orphan and worked in the mines for a pittance, and had he not become first a millionaire and then President of the United States? There are times when nothing is more misleading than personal experience, and the man whose experience has embraced only success is likely to be a forlorn and alien figure when his whole world begins to fail. ~ Richard Hofstadter

Dreams, Mrs. Sawyer, are misleading, because they make life seem real. When it loses the support of dreams, life dissolves. ~ Robert Aickman

bit of inaccurate information that somehow concerned crop or commodity market information or conditions. It does not matter whether you sent that message by telephone or mail or telegraph. It does not matter who you sent that letter to. It does not matter whether the information was actually false, or merely misleading. It does not matter whether your note actually had any effect on market prices anywhere, or even whether you intended for it to have that effect. The way this law was written by the morons in Congress, you are guilty of a felony if you send a postcard to your grandmother in a nursing home, trying to make her feel better by lying about how nice the weather has been in Florida, or how low the gas prices have been. And you will not find this law in Title 18 either; this one is buried in the bowels of Title 7 (sec. 13), which lists the laws supposedly regulating "Agriculture." Even ~ James Duane

Somewhere off to my left, a little voice chirped: The redhead is smart. We can help.
In a nearby tree sat a murder of crows. (That's what you call a group of them. You learn useless facts like that in Valhalla.) "Uh, guys," I told my friends, "those crows claim they can help."
Claim? squawked another crow. You don't trust us? Send your two friends back to the ship with the mead. We'll give you a hand here. All we ask for in return is something shiny. Anything will do.
I related this to my friends.


I looked at the crows. "Okay, guys, what's the plan?"
Plan? cawed the nearest crow. We just said we'd help. We don't have a plan, per se.
Stupid misleading crows. Also, what kind of bird uses the term per se?
Since I didn't have time to murder the entire murder, I contemplated my limited options. ~ Rick Riordan

Voluntary communism, together with laissez-faire capitalism, has nothing to be ashamed of on moral and economic grounds. They can each hold up their heads, high. Far from enemies, they are merely opposite sides of the same voluntaristic coin. Together, they must battle state coercion, whether called State Capitalism or State Socialism. The point is, "left" vs. "right" is a red herring. The reddest and perhaps most misleading red herring in all political-economic theory. ~ Walter Block

In these and other respects a discussion of puzzles and rules illuminates the nature of normal scientific practice. Yet, in another way, that illumination may be significantly misleading. Though there obviously are rules to which all the practitioners of a scientific specialty adhere at a given time, those rules may not by themselves specify all that the practice of those specialists has in common. ~ Thomas S. Kuhn

Just as there are legal guidelines concerning the police use of provocateurs, there must be limits to how far the media can go in setting up a misleading situation ... I, for one, can simply not accept that telling a lie is an acceptable way of reporting the truth ... Every poll of public opinion shows that there is a suspicion among the general public that the media do not tell the whole truth, or that they distort things, or that they exaggerate, or that they are biased. ~ Peter Robinson

Think of people like bottles full of a liquid inside but without labels; smell the bottle, pour out what is inside and study it carefully. Never mind the labels; pretend that they don't exist! Labels are misleading! ~ Mehmet Murat Ildan

French and German illustrate the misleading character of apparent grammatical simplicity just as well. ~ Edward Sapir

I feel like bands should be growing, living, functioning entities and to crystallize a band into a single album, and for that to be a touchstone - I understand it from a fan's perspective but I also feel like it's a little bit misleading in terms of the way bands actually function. ~ Steve Albini

It's really hard to talk about writing, and I'm usually conscious if I'm misleading people or misleading the questioner, because the problem with writing is the next line. ~ Tom Stoppard

I think it's misleading to think that art is only there for escapism, only there for our dreams of being rich and f - king whoever we wanna f - k. ~ Saul Williams

Rarely do we invest the time to open the book of another's life. When we do, we are usually surprised to find its cover so misleading and its reviews so flawed. ~ Richard Paul Evans

Whether a person is aware of it or not, he is assaulted constantly by misleading and hostile voices within the mind. They speak both through you and to you. Everyone is their target, but because of their extreme cunning, few people ever detect and dismiss them. So the only problem is a lack of information about these foreign voices. The curing facts are as close as your desire for them. It is extremely important for you to remember the following truth: these hurtful voices are not you, and they do not belong to you, but merely speak through your psychic system. Don't take them as being your own voices, any more than you take radio voices as being your own. They simply use unaware human beings. Your true nature has nothing to do with them. When finally dismissing these sinister speakers you make room for spiritual health and true life. ~ Vernon Howard

Mariac tells us about the books he's read, the painters he's liked, the plays he's seen. He finds himself by looking in the works of others. He defines his own faith by a passionate anger against Gide the Luciferian. Reading his 'memories' is like meeting a man on a train who says, 'Don't look at me; that's misleading. If you want to know what I'm like, wait until we're in a tunnel, and then study my reflection in the window.' You wait, and look, and catch a face against a shifting background of sooty walls, cables, and sudden brickwork. The transparent shape flickers and jumps, always a few feet away. You become accustomed to its existence, you move with its movements; and though you know its presence is conditional, you feel it to be permanent. Then there is a wail from ahead, a roar and a burst of light; the face is gone for ever. ~ Julian Barnes

How could Digital's collapse be so precipitous? It's because, in many ways, financial performance data is misleading. As you move up to the top of the market, you're getting rid of the less profitable products at the low end and adding business with more attractive margins at the high end. The rate of unit volume growth might be tapering off as you pursue these smaller markets, but your margins actually look better. So Wall Street rewards your stock price until you hit the ceiling. ~ Clayton Christensen

Real culture lives by sympathies and admirations, not by dislikes and disdains; under all misleading wrappings it pounces unerringly upon the human core. ~ William James

The term 'income inequality' is a bit misleading because it suggests in a somewhat pejorative way that the rich are getting richer at the expense of the poor, ~ Edward Lazear

Blue skies can be misleading. ~ Carole Radziwill

Moral capitalism is possible; if not, its strictures are only a kind of misleading vanity, the rhetoric of a secular piety. ~ Stephen Young

The man who knows governments most completely is he who troubles himself least about a definition which shall give their essence. Enjoying an intimate acquaintance with all their particularities in turn, he would naturally regard an abstract conception in which these were unified as a thing more misleading than enlightening. ~ William James

The greatest monster that there is: fake news media: torture with bullying, psychological warfare, spying and then using truthful misleading to complete their plot. The cheapest job ever. ~ Maria Karvouni

Barbara and I had arrived early, so I got to admire everyone's entrance. We were seated at tables around a dance floor that had been set up on the lawn behind the house. Barbara and I shared a table with Deborah Kerr and her husband. Deborah, a lovely English redhead, had been brought to Hollywood to play opposite Clark Gable in The Hucksters. Louis B. Mayer needed a cool, refined beauty to replace the enormously popular redhead, Greer Garson, who had married a wealthy oil magnate and retired from the screen in the mid-fifties. Deborah, like her predecessor, had an ultra-ladylike air about her that was misleading. In fact, she was quick, sharp, and very funny. She and Barbara got along like old school chums. Jimmy Stewart was also there with his wife. It was the first time I'd seen him since we'd worked for Hitchcock. It was a treat talking to him, and I felt closer to him than I ever did on the set of Rope. He was so genuinely happy for my success in Strangers on a Train that I was quite moved. Clark Gable arrived late, and it was a star entrance to remember. He stopped for a moment at the top of the steps that led down to the garden. He was alone, tanned, and wearing a white suit. He radiated charisma. He really was the King. The party was elegant. Hot Polynesian hors d'oeuvres were passed around during drinks. Dinner was very French, with consommé madrilène as a first course followed by cold poached salmon and asparagus hollandaise. During dessert, a lemon soufflé, and cof ~ Farley Granger

A storyteller who provided us with such a profusion of details would rapidly grow maddening. Unfortunately, life itself often subscribes to this mode of storytelling, wearing us out with repetition, misleading emphases and inconsequential plot lines. It insists on showing us Bardak Electronics, the saftey handle in the car, a stray dog, a Christmas card and a fly that lands first on the rim and then in the centre of the ashtray.
Which explains how the curious phenomenon whereby valuable elements may be easier to experience in art and in anticipation than in reality. The anticipatory and artistic imaginations omit and compress; they cut away the periods of boredom and direct our attention to critical moments, and thus, without either lying or embellishing, they lend to life a vividness and a coherence that it may lack in the distracting wooliness of the present. ~ Alain De Botton

The statement 'the Shariah says...' is thus automatically misleading, as there is almost always more than one answer to any legal question. ~ Jonathan A.C. Brown

I don't like the word 'superstar'. It has ridiculous implications. These words - star, stupor, superstar, stupid star - they're misleading. It's a myth. ~ Barbra Streisand

So when they say I'm a low-level systems administrator, that I don't know what I'm talking about, I'd say it's somewhat misleading, ~ Edward Snowden

The library is full of stories of supposed triumphs which makes me very suspicious of it. It's misleading for people to read about great successes, since even for middle-class and upper-class white people, in my experience, failure is the norm ~ Kurt Vonnegut

o have good intentions is irrelevant and misleading. All evil that has ever been done in the universe was done with good intentions. You must measure effect, impact, and consequence, not intentions. - Holy Scrolls of Soeck, Thirteenth Binding Fifteenth Stanza ~ Aaron Lee Yeager

Facts are often misleading; Rumours on the contrary , true or false, are often revealing. ~ Col. Hans Landa

Infallible denotes the quality of never deceiving or misleading and so means wholly trustworthy and reliable; inerrant means wholly true. Scripture is termed infallible and inerrant to express the conviction that all its teaching is the utterance of God who cannot lie, whose word, once spoken, abides for ever, and that therefore it may be trusted implicitly. ~ J.I. Packer

I think that could be perhaps a little misleading and even our statistics can mislead people at the times though they are not misleading in themselves. It is just that people get mislead ~ Norman Tebbit

The hypothesis advanced by the propaganda model, excluded from debate as unthinkable, is that in dealing with the American wars in Indochina, the media were "unmindful", but highly "patriotic" in the special and misleading sense that they kept -- and keep -- closely to the perspective of official Washington and the closely related corporate elite, in conformity to the general "journalistic-literary-political culture" from which "the left" (meaning dissident opinion that questions jingoist assumptions) is virtually excluded. The propaganda model predicts that this should be generally true not only of the choice of topics covered and the way they are covered, but also, and far more crucially, of the general background of the presuppositions within which the issues are framed and the news presented. Insofar as there is debate among dominant elites, it will be reflected within the media, which in this narrow sense, may adopt an "adversarial stance" with regard to those holding office, reflecting elite dissatisfaction with current policy. Otherwise the media will depart from elite consensus only rarely and in limited ways. Even when large parts of the general public break free of the premises of the doctrinal system, as finally happened during the Indochina wars, real understanding based upon an alternative conception of the evolving history can be developed only with considerable effort by the most diligent and skeptical. And such understanding as can be reached through serious a ~ Noam Chomsky

She gazed at the man across from her. Her lover. His powerful shoulders worked beneath his shirt as he pulled on the oars. The display of strength and agility, set to a steady rhythm…memories of their lovemaking assailed her with quiet force.
In some other place, under some other circumstance, they might have been a courting couple. Rowing across a placid lake, caressed by a glowing sunset. From a distance, this could have been the picture of romance.
But the reality was confusion, and resentment, and pain. Did she feel sorry for misleading him? Sophia considered. She was not sure she could. By his own admission, he would not have made love to her had she not. And she could not regret that exquisite pleasure; nor could she regret sharing it with him. She looked at the handsome, strong, charismatic, passionate, exhausted man across from her. Selfish and wicked though she might be, she could not feel sorry that he was now bound to her-that for good or ill, he had not left her behind.
Sophia was, however, unequivocally sorry for one thing.
"Gray," she said, "I'm so sorry I've hurt you."
His eyes flashed, and there was a slight hitch in his stroke. ~ Tessa Dare

Given the limits of our knowledge of such psychological problems as belief and motivation, the question of sincerity ... is misleading and fruitless. ~ Donald Weinstein

Taxes are necessary. But the system of discriminatory taxation universally accepted under the misleading name of progressive taxation of income and inheritance is not a mode of taxation. It is rather a mode of disguised expropriation of the successful capitalists and entrepreneurs. ~ Ludwig Von Mises

It's misleading to think of writers as special creatures, word sorcerers who possess some sort of magical knowledge hidden from everyone else. Writers are ordinary people who like to write. They feel the urge to write, and they scratch that itch every chance they get. ~ Ralph Fletcher

That was the first time a younger girl who looked dashing in glasses had said something like that to me. Well, that phrasing suggests that this was the first time that someone who was a girl; my junior; and also good-looking in glasses had said something like that. That's a bit of a misleading turn of phrase. Allow me to correct myself. That was the first time I had heard something like that from a girl who looked good in glasses, or from a girl who was my junior, or from a girl who was a xenor. Heck, no girl has ever taken an interest in me, as far as I can remember. ~ Torii Nagomu

The central assertion of this book is that the world of humankind constitutes a manifold, a totality of interconnected processes, and inquiries that disassemble this totality into bits and then fail to reassemble it falsify reality. Concepts like "nation," "society," and "culture" name bits and threaten to turn names into things. Only by understanding these names as bundles of relationships, and by placing them back into the field from which they were abstracted, can we hope to avoid misleading inferences and increase our share of understanding. ~ Eric R. Wolf

I soon discovered the Hat and Feathers was a misleading name. In it there was no hat, and absolutely no feathers. There were just heavily inebriated people with red faces laughing at their own jokes. This, I soon discovered, was a typical pub. The 'pub' was an invention of humans living in England, designed as compensation for the fact that they were humans living in England. I rather liked the place. ~ Matt Haig

That peril is that the human intellect is free to destroy itself. Just as one generation could prevent the very existence of the next generation, by all entering a monastery or jumping into the sea, so one set of thinkers can in some degree prevent further thinking by teaching the next generation that there is no validity in any human thought. It is idle to talk always of the alternative of reason and faith. Reason is itself a matter of faith. It is an act of faith to assert that our thoughts have any relation to reality at all. If you are merely a sceptic, you must sooner or later ask yourself the question, "Why should anything go right; even observation and deduction? Why should not good logic be as misleading as bad logic? They are both movements in the brain of a bewildered ape?" The young sceptic says, "I have a right to think for myself." But the old sceptic, the complete sceptic, says, "I have no right to think for myself. I have no right to think at all." There ~ G.K. Chesterton

I mean, to talk about "corporate greed" is like talking about "military weapons" or something like that―there just is no other possibility. A corporation is something that is trying to maximize power and profit: that's what it is. There is no "phenomenon" of corporate greed, and we shouldn't mislead people into thinking there is. It's like talking about "robber's greed" or something like that―it's not a meaningful thing, it's misleading. A corporation's purpose is to maximize profit and market share and return to investors, and all that kind of stuff, and if its officers don't pursue that goal, for one thing they are legally liable for not pursuing it. There I agree with Milton Friedman [right-wing economist] and those guys: if you're a C.E.O., you must do that―otherwise you're in dereliction of duty, in fact dereliction of duty. And besides that, if you don't do it, you'll get kicked out by the shareholders or the Board of Directors, and you won't be there very long anyway. ~ Noam Chomsky

I have encountered a few 'creationists' and because they were usually nice, intelligent people, I have been unable to decide whether they were really mad or only pretending to be mad. If I was a religious person, I would consider creationism nothing less than blasphemy. Do its adherents imagine that God is a cosmic hoaxer who has created the whole vast fossil record for the sole purpose of misleading humankind ? ~ Arthur C. Clarke

Unlike modern military codes, ancient texts are almost never purposely misleading, purposely scrambled ... indeed, literacy was so uncommon until classical times that the very writing of a message sufficed to keep it from almost everybody. ~ E. J. W. Barber

Christianity has taken the part of all the weak, the low, the botched; it has made an ideal out of antagonism to all the self preservative instincts of sound life; it has corrupted even the faculties of those natures that are intellectually most vigorous, by representing the highest intellectual values as sinful, as misleading, as full of temptation. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

War as a moral metaphor is limited, limiting, and dangerous. By reducing the choices of action to "a war against" whatever-it-is, you divide the world into Me or Us (good) and Them or It (bad) and reduce the ethical complexity and moral richness of our life to Yes/No, On/Off. This is puerile, misleading, and degrading. In stories, it evades any solution but violence and offers the reader mere infantile reassurance. All too often the heroes of such fantasies behave exactly as the villains do, acting with mindless violence, but the hero is on the "right" side and therefore will win. Right makes might. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

It's relatively easy to agree that only Homo sapiens can speak about things that don't really exist, and believe six impossible things before breakfast. You could never convince a monkey to give you a banana by promising him limitless bananas after death in monkey heaven. But why is it important? After all, fiction can be dangerously misleading or distracting. People who go to the forest looking for fairies and unicorns would seem to have less chance of survival than people who go looking for mushrooms and deer. And if you spend hours praying to non-existing guardian spirits, aren't you wasting precious time, time better spent foraging, fighting and fornicating? ~ Yuval Noah Harari

To say that 'wealth in America is so unfairly distributed in America,' as Ronald Dworkin does, is grossly misleading when most wealth in the United States is not distributed: at all. People create it, earn it, save it, and spend it. ~ Thomas Sowell