Word: falsehood
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...certain Augustinian pessimism. Nothing seems to me more demonstrably untrue--demonstrable from the received experience of the race that we call history--than the optimism that pervades such enjoyable texts as Mill's On Liberty and Milton's Areopagitica--that is, if you just let truth and falsehood fight, falsehood will be beaten." He laughs, a rare indulgence. "That's refuted on every page. Falsehood has lots of advantages. There are a lot more forms of it than there are forms of truth. An awful lot of truths are not very pleasant, and don't make people happy. The first...
...censoriousness of tone that begins with the Guinness Book's first page, a starkly understated discussion of the sizes and careers of various giants, and proceeds through recurring lamentations on the varieties of human duplicity. For example, the McWhirters say. "No single subject is more obscured by vanity, deceit, falsehood and deliberate fraud than the extremes of human longevity." But they insist that even such cascades of synonyms are intended to be purely factual...
...rest of us, we have so shriveled in the decades of falsehood, thirsted so long in vain for the refreshing drops of truth, that as soon as they fall upon our faces we tremble with joy. We so rejoice in every little word of truth, so utterly suppressed until recent years, that we forgive those who first voice it for us-all their near misses, all their inexactitudes, even a portion of error greater than the portion of truth, simply because "something at least, something at last has been said...
...alternative, one might demonstrate to students that nearly all the great creative geniuses of early modern science approached their subject with consciously religious motives; thus one could counter the widespread falsehood that religious faith and scientific progress are somehow incompatible. One might employ in this task the writings of a highly respected 19th-century American scholar, Andrew Dixon White, who made the crucial point that genuine religion often differs from the attitudes of unimaginative and institutionalized theologians...
...Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper," he wrote. "...that man who never looks into a newspaper is better informed than he who reads them: inasmuch as he knows nothing is nearer to the truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehood and errors." This was no run-of-the-mill vice president, but Thomas Jefferson, better known and more often remembered for his stated preference for newspapers without government over government without newspapers...