Alternative Facts Quotes

“Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts.”
― Daniel Patrick Moynihan

“To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy, to forget whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again: and above all, to apply the same process to the process itself -- that was the ultimate subtlety: consciously to induce unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become unconscious of the act of hypnosis you had just performed. Even to understand the word 'doublethink' involved the use of doublethink.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“Facts are threatening to those invested in fraud.”
― DaShanne Stokes

“Hey, I like unicorns. Unicorns are just weaponized ponies.”
― Damon Suede, Bad Idea

“Leadership by deception isn't leadership. It's fraud.”
― DaShanne Stokes

“When you've grown up mis-educated, surrounded by fear and hate, unaware of your privilege, lies can sound like the truth.”
― DaShanne Stokes

“The truth is that our self-deceptive lies range from seemingly tiny untruths to massive life-altering falsehoods about reality.”
― Cortney S. Warren, Lies We Tell Ourselves: The Psychology of Self-Deception

“Two half truths don't make one truth.”
― Joseph Julius Bonkowski Jr., "Quote Me" the Book of All New Quotes

“Lying is second nature to him... More than anyone else I have ever met, Trump has the ability to convince himself that whatever he is saying at any given moment is true, or sort of true, or at least ought to be true.”
― Tony Schwartz

“We must speak truth to power and confront ignorance with facts.”
― DaShanne Stokes

“Truthful hyperbole’ is a contradiction in terms. It’s a way of saying, ‘It’s a lie, but who cares?’ ”
― Tony Schwartz

“It seems too simplistic that just repeating a persuasive message should increase its effect, but that’s exactly what psychological research finds (again and again). Repetition is one of the easiest and most widespread methods of persuasion. In fact it’s so obvious that we sometimes forget how powerful it is.”
― Jeremy Bean

“If lies are more comforting to you than facts, you need to get out of your comfort zone.”
― DaShanne Stokes

“The first thing people hear or see on the internet is the first thing they believe. No matter what the truth is.”
― James Hauenstein

“Alternative facts are not facts. They are falsehoods.”
― Chuck Todd

“The significance of the effect is determined by the importance of the immediate cause.”
― L Smith, A Different Path, Part 2

“Surely if Alternative Facts are untrue they should be called Ficts?”
― Alan Dapre

“When the mistakes fall disproportionately on one side, it is no respect for the notion of truth to pretend that everything is even.”
― Lee McIntyre, Post-Truth

“If the people believe there’s an imaginary river out there, you don’t tell them there’s no river there. You build an imaginary bridge over the imaginary river”
― Nikita Khrushchev

“When the mainstream media and the ruling class decide to pick on a critical issue, it is usually for two reasons: first, the issue is serious enough and is affecting their interests, and therefore the narrative must be controlled to ensure that the results are in their favor. Second, in doing the former, the ruling class gets to strictly filter and manage the narrative on what needs to be said about any given topic; which ‘experts’ are given the stage to speak; and whose voices are excluded from debates, or even defamed and slandered, if necessary.”
― Louis Yako

“A new form of lying has emerged in recent times. This is what Arendt calls “image-making,” where factual truth is dismissed if it doesn’t fit the image. The image becomes a substitute for reality. All such lies harbor an element of violence: organized lying always tends to destroy whatever it has decided to negate. The difference between the traditional political lie and the modern lie is the difference between hiding something and destroying it. We have recently seen how fabricated images can become a reality for millions of people, including the image-maker himself. We have witnessed this in the 2016 American presidential election. Despite the obvious falsity of his claims, the president insists that the crowd at his inauguration was the largest in history; despite the fact that he did not receive a majority of votes, he insists that this was because millions of fraudulent votes were cast; and despite the evidence that Russians interfered with the presidential election, the president claims that the “suggestion” that there was Russian interference is just a devious way of calling his legitimacy into question. The real danger here is that an image is created that loyal followers want to believe regardless of what is factually true. They are encouraged to dismiss anything that conflicts with the image as “fake news” or the conspiracy of elites who want to fool them. What Arendt wrote more than a half a century ago might have been written yesterday. “Contemporary history is full of instances in which tellers of factual truth were felt to be more dangerous, and even more hostile, than the real opponents” (Arendt 1977: 255). Arendt was not sanguine that tellers of factual truth would triumph over image-makers. Factual truth-telling is frequently powerless against image-making and can be defeated in a head-on clash with the powers that be. Nevertheless, she did think that ultimately factual truth has a stubborn power of its own. Image-makers know this, and that is why they seek to discredit a free press and institutions where there is a pursuit of impartial truth.”
― Richard J. Bernstein, Why Read Hannah Arendt Now?

“Doubt is crucial to science in the version we call curiosity or healthy scepticism, it drives science forward – but it also makes science vulnerable to misrepresentation, because it is easy to take uncertainties out of context and create the impression that everything is unresolved. This was the tobacco industry's key insight: that you could use normal scientific uncertainty to undermine the status of actual scientific knowledge.”
― Naomi Oreskes, Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming

“The anti-Dreyfus camp enlisted in defense of the authority of the state and the honor of the army both conservatives and some Leftists influenced by traditional anticapitalist anti-Semitism and Jacobin forms of nationalism. The pro-Dreyfus camp, mostly from Left and center, defended a universal standard of the rights of man. The nation took precedence over any universal value, proclaimed the anti-Dreyfusard Charles Maurras, whose Action Française movement is sometimes considered the first authentic fascism. When a document used to incriminate Dreyfus turned out to have been faked, Maurras was undaunted. It was, he said, a “patriotic forgery,” a faux patriotique.”
― Robert O. Paxton, The Anatomy of Fascism

“A part of journalism’s perversion and the rise of infotainment is that voice is very important these days.”
― A.D. Aliwat, In Limbo

“The Zionist leadership came up with two kinds of response to this predicament: one for public consumption, the other for the limited corps of intimates Ben-Gurion had collected around himself.”
― Ilan Pappé, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine