falsehood quotes

  Sentences which simply express moral judgements do not say anything. Theyare pure expressions of feeling and as such donot come under the categoryof truth and falsehood.

-Ayer, SirAlfred Jules
  Language, Truth and Logic, ch.6.

Le bon sens est la chose du monde la mieux partage¤  e: car chacun pense en e"  tre si bien pourvu, que ceux me"  me qui sont les plus difficiles a'   contenter en toute autre chose n'ont point coutume d'en de¤  sirer plus qu'ils ont. En quoi il n'est pas vraisemblable que tous se trompent; mais pluto" t  cela te¤  moigne que la puissance de bien juger et distinguer le vrai d'avec le faux, qui est proprement ce qu'on nomme le bon sens ou la raison, est naturellement e¤  gale en tous les hommes. Good sense is the most fairly distributed thing in the world; for everyone thinks himself so well supplied with it, that even those who are hardest to satisfy in every other way do not usually desire more of it than they already have. In this matter it is not likely that everybody is mistaken; it rather goes to show that the power of judging well and distinguishing truth from falsehood, which is what we properly mean by good sense or reason, is naturally equal in all men.

-Descartes, Rene¤
  Discours de la me¤  thode (Discourse on Method),1st discourse (translated by G E M  Anscombe and Peter Geach).

Nature meant me A wife, a silly, harmless, household dove, Fond without art, and kind without deceit; But Fortune, that has made a mistress of me, Has thrust me out to the wide world, unfurnish'd Of falsehood to be happy.

-Dryden,John
  Cleopatra.  All for Love,or The World Well Lost, act 4.

I paid the prices of life Standing where Rome immortal heard October's strife, A war poet whose right of honour cuts falsehood like a knife. 375

-Gurney, Ivor
c.1922  'Poem for End'.

Once to every man and nation comes the moment to decide, In the strife of Truth with Falsehood, for the good or evil side.

-Lowell,James Russell
  'The Present Crisis', in the Boston Courier,11Dec. Collected in Poems: Second Series,1848. The poem was written in the midst of the controversy over whether Texas should be annexed and slavery extended.

And though all the winds of doctrine were let loose to play upon the earth, soTruth be in the field, we do injuriously by licensing and prohibiting to misdoubt her strength. Let her and Falsehood grapple; who ever knew Truth put to the worse in a free and open encounter?

-Milton,John
  Areopagitica: a speech for the liberty of unlicensed printing.

He replied that I must needs be mistaken, or that I said the thing which was not. (For they have no word in their language to express lying or falsehood.)

-Swift,Jonathan
  Gulliver'sTravels,'A Voyage to the Houyhnhnms', ch.3.

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Webster's New World Dictionary of Quotations Copyright © 2005 by Chambers Harrap Publishers Ltd. All rights reserved. Published by Wiley, Hoboken, NJ. Used by arrangement with John Wiley & Sons, Inc.