Word: falsehood
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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James Russel Lowell, the famous Harvard English professor and 19th century abolitionist poet, wrote with regard to learning from the past, "[W]e make their truth our falsehood, thinking that hath made us free." Just as it is so easy to create an anachronistic philosophy of life out of an old truth passed down from previous generations, it is also easy to let our fears of repeating the past hold us prisoner. President Clinton can't let go and let the past be the past...
Nobody has to advise Cheech to create his own moral universe. His instinct for truth and falsehood has been honed by his profession, and his hot-wired street smarts make him far more acute on the subject of human behavior than any playwright. Slumped in a back row of the theater, keeping an eye on Olive, he is bored and offended by the pretentious twaddle emanating from the stage. Beginning with a few suggestions for line changes, Cheech is soon proposing structural alterations, then secretly joining David in a pool hall to rewrite the play. Among the young playwright...
Although this is patently untrue, Harvard students will encounter this falsehood at every turn of their undergraduate careers. Harvard teachers and administrators like to emphasize the process of scholarship and reasoning, saying that professors teach students how to research and how to construct an argument...
...idea of the thinking liberal assumes the existence of perfect ideological independence. This is a falsehood. Our political views are not created in a vacuum. Our personal beliefs are influenced by the values of our families and communities, our educations and our personal experiences. To pretend, as the thinking liberals do, that one's view have evolved entirely free of bias is to commit an act of dishonesty. To idealistically proclaim that we can, through the cult of rationality, break free of these biases is to exhibit the most extreme naivete...
Most egregiously, Gabay has now begun to perpetrate a purposeful falsehood about the petition, calling it, at this week's Harvard Political Union debate on the subject, an "omnibus bill." As a senior government major, Gabay must be aware that an omnibus bill allows just one vote, "yes" or "no," on an entire package of legislation. And Gabay knows that our referendum allows a separate vote on each of the issues. This is the same pattern of fabrication that is apparent in his statements about our student government constitution...