Quotes & Sayings About Untrue

within an established totalitarian regime the purpose of propaganda is not to persuade, much less to inform, but rather to humiliate. From this point of view, propaganda should not approximate to the truth as closely as possible: on the contrary, it should do as much violence to it as possible. For by endlessly asserting what is patently untrue, by making such untruth ubiquitous and unavoidable, and finally by insisting that everyone publicly acquiesce in it, the regime displays its power and reduces individuals to nullities. — Anthony Daniels

When I first started comedy, me and my friends were kids. I claim - although I know that it's a spurious and probably untrue claim - that we were the first generation of kids to act black. — Moshe Kasher

Should one continue to base one's life on a system of belief that
for all its occasional wisdom and frequent beauty
is demonstrably untrue? — Charles Templeton

I believe politicians should aim to be accurate and truthful in what they say at all times. You can be truthful and inaccurate but what you shouldn't be doing at any time is saying things that are untrue or making commitments that you have no intention of honouring. — Malcolm Turnbull

People settle for so much less because they find their identities in the world's fickle and untrue opinions. God made you royal with His blood. Live. — Lacey Mosley

The single story creates stereotypes, and the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. They make one story become the only story. — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

In my first publication I might have claimed that I had come to the conclusion, as a result of serious study of the literature and deep thought, that valuable antibacterial substances were made by moulds and that I set out to investigate the problem. That would have been untrue and I preferred to tell the truth that penicillin started as a chance observation. My only merit is that I did not neglect the observation and that I pursued the subject as a bacteriologist. My publication in 1929 was the starting-point of the work of others who developed penicillin especially in the chemical field. — Alexander Fleming

Professional historians approach such stories with great caution, knowing there will certainly be many fake baubles in the pile. Some accounts will be almost entirely untrue. All will be somewhat distorted according to the prejudices of the author and the political requirements of the moment. Different accounts must be weighed against each other, as well as the documentary evidence and the archaeological record. Sometimes the surviving records are scant and confusing. — Richard Fidler

Each day look into your conscience and amend your faults; if you fail in this duty you will be untrue to the Knowledge and Reason that are within you. Keep a watchful eye over yourself as if you were your own enemy; for you cannot learn to govern yourself, unless you first learn to govern your own passions and obey the dictates of your conscience. — Khalil Gibran

There's a widespread belief that if you have solid self-esteem you don't need outside affirmation and praise. This is patently untrue, by the way. — Harriet Lerner

I think humanitarian organizations should acknowledge the progress more than they do. I think that one reason people are reluctant to provide more help to Africa, for example, is this sense that it's just hopeless, in a way that I think is untrue. — Nicholas Kristof

I think that there have been a lot of fear-based assertions that feminism is about aggression, and that is incorrect and untrue. Feminism is about equality; that's what it's about. — Jenny Slate

He who repeats a tale after a man,
Is bound to say, as nearly as he can,
Each single word, if he remembers it,
However rudely spoken or unfit,
Or else the tale he tells will be untrue,
The things invented and the phrases new. — Geoffrey Chaucer

There are people accusing me that I'm sick, that I'm a danger to morals, western civilization and basically everything under the sun. And they've got these wild stories about me, completely off the wall, completely untrue. They thought them up and it makes you wonder what goes on in their brain, but of course, they don't consider themselves sick. They think they're normal because they don't dress like I do. — Marilyn Manson

Of all lies, art is the least untrue. — Gustave Flaubert

They loved, and quarreled, and made up, and loved, and fought, and were true to each other and untrue. She made him the happiest man in the whole world and the most wretched, and after a few years she died, and then, when he was thirty, he died, too. But by that time Catullus had invented the love poem. — Tom Stoppard

Love is always true and eternal.
Love can't be untrue or occasional. — Debasish Mridha

It is the mistaken idea that if I reward mediocrity, I will curtail the person's aspirations to be better. That is a commonly held myth that keeps some parents from verbally affirming children. Of course, it's untrue. — Gary Chapman

All religions are both harmful and untrue. — Bertrand Russell

When some people rejoin with "All Lives Matter" they misunderstand the problem, but not because their message is untrue. It is true that all lives matter, but it is equally true that not all lives are understood to matter which is precisely why it is most important to name the lives that have not mattered, and are struggling to matter in the way they deserve. — Judith Butler

Everything looked and sounded unreal. Nothing was what it is. That's what I wanted - to be alone with myself in another world where truth is untrue and life can hide from itself. — Eugene O'Neill

One reason I avoid the American TV talk show circuit, when I'm over there, is that the tabloids and the gossip mill are always churning with new, true, or untrue stories about new loves, old loves, pending marriages, divorces, trial separations, flings and affairs with people of every description. I'm not into any of that. — George Harrison

The argument was wilful,
The alternatives untrue,
We need no metaphysics
To sanction what we do
Or to muffle us in comfort
From what we did not do. — Louis MacNeice

People forget that stereotypes aren't bad because they are always untrue. Stereotypes are bad because they are not always true. If we allow ourselves to judge another based on a stereotype, we have allowed a gross generalization to replace our own thinking. — George Takei

Because fulfillment is an illusion, the wise must devote themselves to avoiding pain rather than seeking pleasure, living quietly, as Schopenhauer counseled, 'in a small fireproof room' - advice that now struck Nietzsche as both timid and untrue, a perverse attempt to dwell, as he was to put it pejoratively several years later, 'hidden in forests like shy deer.' Fulfillment was to be reached not by avoiding pain, but by recognizing its role as a natural, inevitable step on the way to reaching anything good. — Alain De Botton

People were only too ready to believe things that were manifestly untrue. When it came to remarks that portrayed others in a bad light, people were happy to believe things that showed others to be weak or flawed in some way: we believed that of them because it made us feel better; it was as simple as that. — Alexander McCall Smith

Freeman denied the claim that he was a "man of God", saying that "the question of faith is whatever you actually believe is. We take a lot of what we're talking about in science on faith; we posit a theory, and until it's dis-proven we have faith that it's true. If the mathematics work out, then it's true, until it's proven to be untrue. — Morgan Freeman

Besides, they say, when we eat something, what really happens is this. Our failing health starts fighting off the attacks of hunger, using the food as an ally. Gradually it begins to prevail, and, in this very process of winning back its normal strength, experiences the sense of enjoyment which we find so refreshing. Now, if health enjoys the actual battle, why wouldn't it also enjoy the victory? Or are we to suppose that when it has finally managed to regain its former vigour - the one thing that it has been fighting for all this time - it promptly falls into a coma, and fails to notice or take advantage of its success? As for the idea that one isn't conscious of health except through its opposite, they say that's quite untrue. Everyone's perfectly aware of feeling well, unless he's asleep or actually feeling ill. Even the most insensitive and apathetic sort of person will admit that it's delightful to be healthy - and what is delight, but a synonym for pleasure? — Thomas More

I read the 'Times' and 'Post,' but I have nothing against the 'Daily News.' I also fish around the Internet for entertainment news but find most of what I read to be untrue or partially true. — Andy Cohen

I realize that Kenya and America are very different, but experiences like this warned me that my own favorite beliefs in the miracles of free enterprise and the boundless opportunities to be had in America were largely untrue — Chris Coons

I used to think that having many material things would increase one's stock of happiness. I found that to be completely untrue. The trappings don't make the man at all. — George Harrison

Both transparency and trust form the basic component of truth itself. With truth, there is no need to be untrue. If one is truthful, then there is godliness because God is truth. And when godliness is on your side, success is guaranteed. — Vishwas Chavan

We decide what we will make of each and every situation. We decide whether we'll break or whether we'll resist. We decide whether we'll assent or reject. No one can force us to give up or to believe something that is untrue (such as, that a situation is absolutely hopeless or impossible to improve). Our perceptions are the thing that we're in complete control of. — Ryan Holiday

But men are bound to say
Some things that, though untrue,
Will get you down the aisle
Until you say "I do. — Joyce Rachelle

To say that he was not startled, or that his blood was not conscious of a terrible sensation to which it had been a stranger from infancy, would be untrue. — Charles Dickens

Insofar as it is true, the idea that our actions or beliefs are merely one link in a causal link that runs back to the beginning of the universe is making a trivial claim. Insofar as it is saying something profound, the claim is untrue. — Kenan Malik

There are certain verses in the Quran which convey injunctions similar to the following: 'Kill them wherever you find them.' (2:191)
Referring to such verses, there are some who attempt to give the impression that Islam is a religion of war and violence. This is total untrue. Such verses relate in a restricted sense, to those who have unilaterally attacked the Muslims. The above verse does not convey the general command of Islam. (pp. 42-43) — Maulana Wahiduddin Khan

You might tell yourself that candor is the foundation of a relationship, but even that would be untrue. You are far more likely to lie to yourself, or your loved one, if you think it will keep the pain at bay. — Jodi Picoult

Lying, the telling of beautiful untrue things, is the proper aim of Art. — Oscar Wilde

I thought of America as this crazy, happy, exciting place where everybody's rich and there's stuff everywhere. Compared to Pakistan, it's not untrue. — Kumail Nanjiani

It would be nice to say that after this small breakthrough, neither Liesel nor Max dreamed their bad visions again. It would be nice but untrue. The nightmares arrived like they always did, much like the best player in the opposition when you've heard rumors that he might be injured or sick - but there he is, warming up with the rest of them, ready to take the field. Or like a timetabled train, arriving at a nightly platform, pulling the memories behind it on a rope. A lot of dragging. A lot of awkward bounces. — Markus Zusak

To the untrue man, the whole universe is false- it is impalpable- it shrinks to nothing within his grasp. And he himself is in so far as he shows himself in a false light, becomes a shadow, or, indeed, ceases to exist. — Nathaniel Hawthorne

There is no overacting, only untrue acting. — Stellan Skarsgard

Anyone in any walk of life who is content with mediocrity is untrue to himself and to American tradition. — George S. Patton Jr.

Do not take the yardstick of your ignorance to measure what the ancients knew, and call everything which you do not know lies. Do not call things untrue because they are marvelous, but give them a fair consideration. — Wendell Phillips

As a fact it was, in my mind, at one and the same time absolutely true and obviously untrue, and perhaps only children are able to accommodate double-faced facts like these. — Zadie Smith

Gandalf! I thought you were dead! But then I thought I was dead myself. Is everything sad going to come untrue? What's happened to the world?"
A great Shadow has departed," said Gandalf, and then he laughed and the sound was like music, or like water in a parched land; and as he listened the thought came to Sam that he had not heard laughter, the pure sound of merriment, for days upon days without count. — J.R.R. Tolkien

Look, how many stories have I broken? Hundreds. How many have proved to be untrue? There isn't one. — Jude Law

The art of politics, under democracy, is simply the art of ringing it. Two branches reveal themselves. There is the art of the demagogue, and there is the art of what may be called, by a shot-gun marriage of Latin and Greek, the demaslave. They are complementary, and both of them are degrading to their practitioners. The demagogue is one who preaches doctrines he knows to be untrue to men he knows to be idiots. The demaslave is one who listens to what these idiots have to say and then pretends that he believes it himself. — H.L. Mencken

Mrs. Lindbergh declined all pleas to kiss or embrace her son, explaining that they came from "an undemonstrative Nordic race," which in her case was wholly untrue. — Bill Bryson

We tend to regard history as true and 'The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn' as untrue. That's always puzzled me. — Tim O'Brien

The most useful piece of learning for the uses of life is to unlearn what is untrue. — Antisthenes

Americans, like human beings everywhere, believe many things that are obviously untrue, the monograph went on. Their most destructive untruth is that it is very easy for any American to make money. They will not acknowledge how in fact how hard money is to come by, and, there, those who have no money blame and blame and blame themselves. — Kurt Vonnegut

Half the lies our opponents tell about us are untrue. — Boyle Roche

I do. I choose you,
which is to choose him and the others and to say
Everything I was ever told of love

was so simple as to be untrue.
Let me see for myself what you desire beside me.
Let me look it in the face and kiss him. — Jameson Fitzpatrick

The effect of untrue statements on casual conversations is one of my great loves, my great ongoing investigations. — Jesse Ball

That economics is untrue which ignores or disregards moral values. — Mahatma Gandhi

I'm always interested in debunking myths if they are untrue. But it's also important to identify myths and how they function, what value they may have. — Neal Ascherson

Every one of the numberless religions and religious sects views the Deity after its own fashion; and, fathering on the unknown its own speculations, it enforces these purely human outgrowths of overheated imagination on the ignorant masses, and calls them "revelation." As the dogmas of every religion and sect often differ radically, they cannot be true. And if untrue, what are they? — H. P. Blavatsky

He doesn't mind this, I thought. He doesn't mind it at all. Maybe he even likes it. We are not each other's, any more. Instead, I am his.
Unworthy, unjust, untrue. But that is what happened.
So Luke: what I want to ask you now, what I need to know is, Was I right? Because we never talked about it. By the time I could have done that, I was afraid to. I couldn't afford to lose you. — Margaret Atwood

So successfully have we disguised from ourselves the intensity of our own feelings, the sensibility of our own hearts, that plays in the tragic tradition have begun to seem untrue. For a couple of hours we may surrender ourselves to a world of fiercely illuminated values in conflict, but when the stage is covered and the auditorium lighted, almost immediately there is a recoil of disbelief. "Well, well!" we say as we shuffle back up the aisle, while the play dwindles behind us with the sudden perspective of an early Chirico painting. By the time we have arrived at Sardi's, if not as soon as we pass beneath the marquee, we have convinced ourselves once more that life has as little resemblance to the curiously stirring and meaningful occurrences on the stage as a jingle has to an elegy of Rilke. — Tennessee Williams

Definitions belong to the definer, not the defined, & I no longer wished to have my life & death foretold by others. I had endured too much to be reduced to an idea. Onto that pyre I threw so many, many words - that entire untrue literature of the past which had shackled & subjugated my as surely as the spiked iron collars & leg locks & jagged basils & balls & chains & headshaving - that had so long denied me my free voice & the stories I needed to tell. I no longer wished to read lies as to who & why I was. I knew who I was — Richard Flanagan

Surely if Alternative Facts are untrue they should be called Ficts? — Alan Dapre

Doesn't anything matter to you?'
'Survival,' I said, but even that sounded untrue now. 'I guess.'
'That's not much.'
I painted a butterfly in Claire's room. Swallowtail. Another, cabbage white. 'I haven't gotten any farther than that. — Janet Fitch

Emotions can certainly be misleading: they can fool you into believing stuff that is definitely, demonstrably untrue. — Francis Spufford

Fiction is lies; we're writing about people who never existed and events that never happened when we write fiction, whether its science fiction or fantasy or western mystery stories or so-called literary stories. All those things are essentially untrue. But it has to have a truth at the core of it. — George R R Martin

Some people do indeed say that Eratosthenes could not have inferred the true measure of the earth. Whether true or untrue, it cannot affect the truth of what I have written on the fixing of the quarters from which the different winds blow. — Marcus Vitruvius Pollio

It is untrue that fiction is nonutilitarian. The uses of fiction are synonymous with the uses of literature. They include refreshment, clarification of life, self-awareness, expansion of our range of experiences, and enlargement of our sense of understanding and discovery, perception, intensification, expression, beauty , and understanding. Like literature generally, fiction is a form of discovery, perception, intensification, expression, beauty, and understanding. If it is all these things, the question of whether it is a legitimate use of time should not even arise. — Leland Ryken

To the extent that a man is untrue to the law of his being and does not rise to personality, he has failed to realize his life's meaning. Fortunately, — C. G. Jung

The problem is that the spurious, the unreal, the untrue is so much easier to find that it is in danger of becoming the norm. — Idries Shah

Anything that belittles or obliterates the holiness of God by a false view of the love of God, is untrue to the revelation of God given by Jesus Christ. — Oswald Chambers

At least since the first petals of the counterculture bloomed across Europe and the United States in the 1960s, it has been fashionable to affirm that all religions are beautiful and all are true ... This is a lovely sentiment but it is dangerous, disrespectful, and untrue. — Stephen Prothero

I will say again that I have never, and would never, harm a child. It sickens me that people have written untrue things about me. — Michael Jackson

The campaign of anti-Islamic slander was so successful that to this day some textbooks in European and American schools refer to Muhammad as having epilepsy, the Qur'an as being copied from Bible, Muslim armies forcing conversions on people (by the sword), and Islam as being against science and learning. All of these are quite untrue, and enlightened Western authors from Arnold Toynbee and Bertrand Russell to Yvonne Haddad and John Esposito have been dispelling these myths on book after book for decades; nevertheless, the message hasn't reached the masses, who still believe numerous myths concerning Islam. — Yahiya Emerick

I have never experienced a stressful feeling that wasn't caused by attaching to an untrue thought. Behind every uncomfortable feeling, there's a thought that isn't true for us. — Byron Katie

Of all false assertions that ever went into the world under the banner of a great name and the mail armor of a well-turned phrase, Locke's comparison of the mind to a blank sheet of paper appears to me among the most untrue. — Letitia Elizabeth Landon

Any concept of biology is not only sterile and profitless, it is distorted and untrue, if it puts its primary focus on unnatural conditions rather than on those vast forces not of man's making that shape and channel the nature and direction of life. — Rachel Carson

We therapists often make inaccurate assumptions about people living with DID and DDNOS. They often appear to be "just like us," so we often assume their experience of life reflects our own. But this is profoundly untrue. It results in a communication gap, and, as a consequence, treatment errors. Because the dominant culture is one of persons with a single sense of self, most with multiple "selves" have learned to hide their multiplicity and imitate those who are singletons (that is, have a single, non-fragmented personality). Therapists who do not understand this sometimes describe their clients' alters without acknowledging their dissociation, saying only that they have different "moods." In overlooking dissociation, this description fails to recognize the essential truth of such disorders, and of the alters. It was difficult for me to comprehend what life was like for my first few dissociative clients. — Alison Miller

the truth is true even if no one believes it, and untrue claims are still untrue even if everyone believes them. — Armin Navabi

The gold of her promise
has never been mined

Her borders of justice
not clearly defined

Her crops of abundance
the fruit and the grain

Have not fed the hungry
nor eased that deep pain

Her proud declarations
are leaves on the wind

Her southern exposure
black death did befriend

Discover this country
dead centuries cry

Erect noble tablets
where none can decry

"She kills her bright future
and rapes for a sou

Then entraps her children
with legends untrue"

I beg you

Discover this country

from America — Maya Angelou

Yet, isn't it strange, isn't it weird, how we can KNOW that someone is not behaving in the way we imagine, and at the same time we can be totally convinced that he is! How clever the human mind is, that it can accept two contradictory things as 'facts.' Yes, I know that in this case one 'fact' was untrue. But the human mind can KNOW something is untrue and still accept it as a 'fact,' and act on it as if it were true. — Aidan Chambers

I have heard stories that it was love at first sight for both of us, that we disappeared to a guest room at Merle's house, had our meals sent up, and didn't emerge for several days. This is absolutely untrue. I would never behave like that as a guest in someone's home. Carlos and I went to my beach house. — Martha Graham

If any theme runs through all my work, it is what Adrienne Rich once called "re-vision", i.e., the re-perceiving of experience, not because our experience is complex or subtle or hard to understand (though it is sometimes all three) but because so much of what's presented to us as "the real world" or "the way it is" is so obviously untrue that a great deal of social energy must be mobilized to hide that gross and ghastly fact. has a theatre critic (whose name I'm afraid I've forgotten) once put it," There's less there than meets the eye". Hence, my love for science fiction, which analyses reality by changing it. — Joanna Russ

One hears a lot of talk about the hostility between scientists and engineers. I don't believe in any such thing. In fact I am quite certain it is untrue ... There cannot possibly be anything in it because neither side has anything to do with the other. — David Hilbert

That was why, later on, he began to lose interest in photography: first when colour took over, then when it became plain that the old magic of light-sensitive emulsions was waning, that to the rising generation the enchantment lay in a techne of images without substance, images that could flash through the ether without residing anywhere, that could be sucked into a machine and emerge from it doctored, untrue. He gave up recording the world in photographs then, and transferred his energies to saving the past. — J.M. Coetzee

Then there is the matter of the presidential untruths. The problem is not just that Barack Obama says things that are untrue but that he lies about what Barack Obama has said. He brags that he set red lines, but then he says it was the U.N. had set red lines. He boasts of pulling out every U.S. soldier from Iraq but then alleges that President Bush, the Iraqis, or Maliki did that. He claims that ISIS are Jayvees but then claims they are serious. But his prevarication too is habitual and was known in 2008 when it was discovered that he had simply misled the nation about his relationships with Jeremiah Wright and Bill Ayers. He had no desire, in the transparent manner of John Kerry, Al Gore, John McCain, or George W. Bush, to release his medical records or college transcripts. If Americans find their president ill-informed, there was no record that he was informed in 2008. His gaffes were far more frequent than those of Sarah Palin, who knew there were 50 states. — Anonymous

That old saying about opportunity only knocking once is as archaic as the flat-earth theory and as patently untrue. Opportunity knocks all the time - and it rings your doorbell, calls you up, and sends you e-mails. — Victoria Moran

Because they claim to be concerned with the welfare of whole societies, governments arrogate to themselves the right to pass off as mere abstract profit or loss the human unhappiness that their decisions provoke or their negligence permits. It is a duty of an international citizenship to always bring the testimony of people's suffering to the eyes and ears of governments, sufferings for which it's untrue that they are not responsible. The suffering of men must never be a mere silent residue of policy. It grounds an absolute right to stand up and speak to those who hold power. — Michel Foucault

...I did what most kids do when their world feels destroyed. I tried to care less about what remained...It was untrue, of course. — Adam Haslett

The speed of communications is wondrous to behold. It is also true that speed can multiply the distribution of information that we know to be untrue. — Edward R. Murrow

At the classical origins of philosophic thought, the transcending concepts remained committed to the prevailing separation between intellectual and manual labor to the established society of enslavement ... Those who bore the brunt of the untrue reality and who, therefore, seemed to be most in need of attaining its subversion were not the concern of philosophy. It abstracted from them and continued to abstract from them. — Herbert Marcuse

We proceed in this society of ours on the possibly valid but untrue assumption that the public knows what it wants-- indeed, that it is given sufficient information about what is available to make such a judgment. And then we jump, irresponsibly and absurdly, to the notion that there is a valid relationship between what the public wants and what it should want. — Edward Albee

A lot of nasty and untrue things have been said about me. — John Higgins

Lies, fictions and untrue suppositions can create new human truths which build technology, art, language, everything that is distinctly of Man. The word "stone" for instance is not a stone, it is an oral pattern of vocal, dental and labial sounds or a scriptive arrangement of ink on a white surface, but man pretends that it is actually the thing it refers to. Every time he wishes to tell another man about a stone he can use the word instead of the thing itself. The word bodies forth the object in the mind of the listener and both speaker and listener are able to imagine a stone without seeing one. All the qualities of stone can be metaphorically and metonymically expressed. "I was stoned, stony broke, stone blind, stone cold sober, stonily silent," oh, whatever occurs. More than that, a man can look at a stone and call it a weapon, a paperweight, a doorstep, a jewel, an idol. He can give it function, he can possess it. — Stephen Fry

I never listen to calumnies, because if they are untrue I run the risk of being deceived, and if they be true, of hating persons not worth thinking about. — Baron De Montesquieu

The moral, of course, is that you must always try to see other people's Point of View before you criticize anybody. Histories are crammed full of unkind things, silly things, and untrue things - why? Because so often the people who write them will not try to see or feel any Point of View but their own ... So mind that you always look out for the Point of View and help people to see yours, too, if you want them to understand you. — Katherine Paterson

STORY, n. A narrative, commonly untrue. The truth of the stories here following has, however, not been successfully impeached. — Ambrose Bierce

A proposition of geometry does not compete with life; and a proposition of geometry is a fair and luminous parallel for a work of art. Both are reasonable, both untrue to the crude fact; both inhere in nature, neither represents it. — Robert Louis Stevenson

The difficulty is to try and teach the multitude that something can be true and untrue at the same time. — Arthur Schopenhauer

Our practical faith in progress has ramified and hardened into an ideology
a secular religion which, like the religions that progress has challenged, is blind to certain flaws in its credentials. Progress, therefore, has become 'myth' in the anthropological sense. By this I do not mean a belief that is flimsy or untrue. Successful myths are powerful and often partly true. [ ... ] The myth of progress has sometimes served us well
those of us seated at the best tables, anyway
and may continue to do so. [ ... ] Progress has an internal logic that can lead beyond reason to catastrophe. (4-5) — Ronald Wright