Tinfoil

“ Almighty God, as has been said, has given us reason to distinguish truth from falsehood, imposture from revelation, delusion from inspiration; and when we quit that light we must wander through endless mazes and dark labyrinths, and ramble where-ever fancy, imagination, or fraud leads us. ”

“ Now, of these four modes of misleading others by the tongue, when there is a justa causa (supposing there can be such) ,— (1) a material lie, that is, an untruth which is not a lie, (2) an equivocation, (3) an evasion, and (4) silence,—First, I have no difficulty whatever in recognizing as allowable the method of silence.
Secondly, But, if I allow of silence, why not of the method of material lying, since half of a truth is often a lie? And, again, if all killing be not murder, nor all taking from another stealing, why must all untruths be lies? ”

“ It is in Silence we hear the voice of Truth. The temples and the marts of men echo all night and day to the clamour of lies and shams and quackeries. But in Silence falsehood cannot live. You cannot float a lie on Silence. A lie has to be puffed aloft, and kept from falling by men’s breath. ”

“ Because they could not put Nature into the witness-box, and question her — of her voiceless 'testimony' they knew nothing. In all cases between man and man, their judgment was to be relied on; but in all cases between man and nature, they were blind leaders of the blind. ”

“ Was but the vain delusion of thy soul.
Maria:
In thee I see the sire of all deceit;
Yet know I too thou oft dost speak the truth.
And any one who chose to set aside
All counsel that might reach him through thy words
To utmost error soon would fall a prey.
And as illusion wears the mask of truth
The better to ensnare the souls of men,
So ’tis but easy for a man to yield
Thereto, by trying like a coward to slink
Past every place where error might be hid.
More than illusion finds the soul in thee;
For in the Spirit of Deceit doth live
The force that gives mankind discernment true. ”

“ We also are transparencies, we worms of the aristocracy, monsters of privilege, held up before the public eye, magnified, projected on newspaper sheets, characterised sometimes aright, more often wrongly, forced to have every nerve in our system, every pulsation in our blood, every motion in our brains, every moment in our lives, and every writhe of our bodies and spasm of our hearts commented on by the vulgar, and brutally misunderstood. ”

“ This agrees with what every thinking man observes, that lying and deceit are universal. The whole of life—politics, society, marriage, the family—is counterfeit. Views which universally prevail are based upon false history; scientific theories are founded on error; the truth of to-day is discovered to be a lie to-morrow; the hero turns out to be a coward, the martyr a hypocrite. ”

“ Revelations of any value from those who cannot, and from those who will not, reveal the ambitious schemes communicated to a very few, are alike hopeless. In default of these, let us examine if any one incident, or class of incidents, in the course of these horrors, may not have made a self-revelation—a silent but significant revelation, pointing the attention of men to the true authors, and simultaneously to the final purposes, of this mysterious conspiracy. ”

“ In several books and newspapers I happened to read lately, I have noticed a certain tone touching the uneducated witness; phrases like "the vagueness characteristic of their class," or "easily confused, as such witnesses are." Now such vagueness is simple truthfulness. Nine times out of ten, it is the confusion any man would show at any given instant about the complications which crowd human life. ”

“ Who has not, at some time or other of his life, experienced the force of that casuistry which is begotten of suspicion? Who has not felt how completely reason is mastered by the subtle assaults of a wily ingenuity which, whilst combining the false and the true, the possible and impossible together, makes out a mock array of evidence almost too strong for a doubt? ”

“ In all minds not convinced that earnest and devoted falsifiers are holding back Development, the story, if remembered at all, will soon renew its fictitious lustre. We are centers of tremors in a quaking black jelly. A bright and shining delusion looks like beaconed security. ”

“ In the relations of this visible world we find them to have been as rational, and shrewd to detect an historic anomaly, as ourselves. But when once the invisible world was supposed to be opened, and the lawless agency of bad spirits assumed, what measures of probability, of decency, of fitness, or proportion—of that which distinguishes the likely from the palpable absurd—could they have to guide them in the rejection or admission of any particular testimony? ”

“ Principles of false thought appeared suddenly and widely as principles of false passion and of false action. Doubts, difficulties, guesses, fine spinnings of the perverse brain, seized upon the temper of the times—became the springs of public and popular movements—engines of political change. ”

“ It is possible to hear a word spoken by another so that it will make your mind disturbed, and to believe that it has reference to you, and causes you either to discover the Conspiracy by flight, or to confuse the action by accelerating it before its time. ”

“ The speeches before us are to the subject what a veil is to a lady's face, or a blind to a window. Almost all that has been said or written upon it is a palpable delusion—an attempt to speak out and say nothing; to oppose something that might be done, and propose something that cannot be done ”

“ So few Europeans have ever had the complaint, and probably none who were competent to describe the specific subjective and psychological symptoms. The delusions one gets as one sinks into the coma, for example, are of quite a peculiar type—delusions of wealth and of absolute power, most exhilarating and magnificent. ”

“ I well know, how these thoughts will [21] affect people outside as well as inside the working-class, who, believing themselves to have a thorough practical acquaintance with life, regard the view here expressed as quite remote from realities. The language of actual facts, as spoken by the whole state of the world to-day, will more and more prove this belief of theirs to be a delusion. ”

“ Without contradicting a single material fact, without telling a single deliberate lie, the narrative would so change the whole world around us, that we should scarcely know we were dealing with the same place and people. ”

“ The whole idea showed an extraordinary ignorance of the British psychology, but absurd as it was, it was none the less the determining influence at the critical moment of the world’s history. The influence of the lie is one of the strangest problems of life—that which is not continually influences that which is. ”

“ If the basic fallacies, or the absence of base, in every specialization of thought can be seen by the units of its opposition, why then we see that all supposed foundations in our whole existence are myths, and that all discussion and supposed progress are the conflicts of phantoms and the overthrow of old delusions by new delusions. ”

“ As for me, I’m tired of being called ‘truthful George’: it calls for such plain language that somebody’s feelings are sure to be singed. What’s the use of telling the truth when a lie is so much more believable and—interesting?”
Being busily engaged in writing a letter to the city editor of the New York Universe, I did not notice that the blare of the megaphone had ceased. ”

“ How baseless are the structures of falsehood, which we build in opposition to the system of eternal nature! If I should escape undetected from this recess, it will be true that I never saw the face of either of these persons, and yet I am acquainted with the most secret transaction of their lives. ”

“ What will it profit me when far away, though you endeavour to vindicate me and to silence such a calumny? Will not your unwonted lenity, your present preposterous supineness, make the detestable rumour wear a look of the utmost speciousness, nay, of irrefragable truth? ”

“ Trench, in his lecture on the Morality of Words, points out how often fair names are given to ugly things: it is in this way that a word which merely denoted an explanation has come to denote a false explanation, an endeavour to deceive. ”

“ A familiar instance of deception is exemplified in the false voices which some persons imagine they hear calling them, faintly in common, but so as to deceive for a moment. When this false perception of sound concurs with images of spectral illusion, a formidable imitation of reality is maintained. ”

“ Each heap is in remembrance of some man who has told a stupendous lie, or failed in carrying out an engagement; and every passer-by takes a stick or a stone to add to the accumulation, saying at the time he does it, 'For So-and-so's lying heap.' It goes on for generations, until they sometimes forget who it was that told the lie, but, notwithstanding that, they continue throwing the stones. ”

“ Well, well, but for the world's delusions there would be little work for busy minds to accomplish. As a fantastic piece of imagery I might conjure up an army of men sweeping the world with brooms made of brains--of knavery, folly, trickery, and delusion. ”

“ The fabrications, often quite clever, of the clearly insane, which in earlier literature are confounded with pathological lying, we have discriminated against as not being profitable for us to discuss here, while not denying, however, the possibility in some instances of lies coexisting with actual delusions. ”

“ There is a special weakness in judgment, which for general purposes is sound. The train of thought is logical, but in ethical discernment the lack appears. The pathological liar does not face openly the question of whether his lies can be seen through. ”

“ No man of common information ever believed a syllable of it. Yet it was of that class of falsehoods, which, by continued repetition, through all the organs of detraction and abuse, are capable of misleading those who are already far misled, and of further fanning passion already kindling into flame. ”

“ In the two instances given above, fear, suspicion, hatred, give rise in one case to a delusional system in the mind of an isolated individual, and in the other to the circulation of an unfounded rumor by men who in their right minds would, to say the least, carefully scrutinize the evidence for such a story before permitting it to be published. ”

“ Fallacies of reflection are fallacies of time and cause, and they may be classed as misreflections and myths. The misreflections are a fourth group of illusions and the myths a fourth group of delusions. ”

“ A truth floats there fair and stately, like some stout ship upon a deep ocean. Silence buoys her up lovingly for all men to see. Not until she has grown worn-out and rotten, and is no longer a truth, will the waters of Silence close over her. ”

“ For when we every day see and feel the many delusions to which human condition is subject, how we are the properties of impostors, the slaves to tyrants, and perpetual dupes of one another, and indeed are subject to daily and endless frauds and impositions ”

“ For this reason, we curse and scoff at your world and reject your pretended truths which, for us, are lies, including those elementary and primordial verities which you declare are evident to common sense, and on which you base your laws, your institutions, your society, your philosophy, your sciences and your arts. ”

“ And one and all, they join in teaching a fundamental lie. They do not know it is a lie, but their ignorance does not make it more of a truth. And the lie they preach is 'thrift.' An instance will demonstrate it. ”

“ Don't my papers tell you that there's going to be war?
conroy
No one pretends, Pollen, that your papers are wonders of undecorated truth.
pollen
Well, this time, trust them. What if they do lie about facts occasionally? I am not interested in facts. Facts are always misleading. ”

“ It was at this point that I had an inspiration. There is no lie so compelling as the truth, when the [45] truth can be made to serve the purpose of a lie. I had heard that Sir Henry frowned like a straight-laced Puritan upon dueling ”

“ At a time when clear thinking and balanced judgments were needed more desperately than ever before, they squirted into the air thick clouds of lies, and half-truths, and misleading phrases, and judgments distorted by hatred and warped by malice. ”

“ But as soon as we penetrate into the psycho-spiritual world such elucidations become less easy. In the world of sense, facts are not altered by human delusions about them; it is therefore possible to correct a delusion by unprejudiced observation of facts. ”

“ Sometimes there were other moments in my life, as in the lives of the rest of my kind, when there were opportunities for sly sabotage—when we thought by the ridiculous speciousness of our alleged facts, to make the pseudo-truths that we pretended to propound stand forth in their gaunt shamelessness for the things they actually were. ”

“ That same editor, on my asking him why he allowed such crying stupidities in the headlines, and nothing but the most platitudinous stuff in the body of the article, gave me the following answer:
"'My dear sir, our public has nerves but no intellect. Hence we work for sudden, rapid shocks to their nerves, and no fatigue to their intellect. They not only do not think; they do not want to think. ”

“ Formed by a slow and delicate process of weaving, through a long system of signs, amidst the agitation of pride, of enthusiasm and of dogmatic obstinacy, what risk, even in the most perfect brain, for these ideas only inadequately to correspond with outward reality! ”