Word: falsehood
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...Magenta set its sights high; it would attempt fairness, accuracy, and encyclopedic coverage; it would avoid gossip, falsehood, and error: in short, it would try to please all of the people all of the time, or as the editors put it in their first editorial...
What he has to say about me is arrant falsehood. He writes that the father of my colleague Patrice Higonnet helped me gain access to important French archives and he implies that because of this alleged assistance I supported Professor Higonnet's appointment to a permanent post in the Department of History Mr. Higonnet pere has never helped me in any connection, so that I cannot possibly have been in fluenced by his favor to support the appointment of his son, as The Crimson itself recognizes...
...such a libel serious? One of the most interesting aspects of this nasty but of defamation is that a number of people who read the article knowing the falsehood of its allegation (many readers, of course, had no reason to doubt it--why would The Crimson print such things if they weren't true?) thought the libel to be beneath notice or even trivial. Others, they felt, were more seriously injured than I. Now it is an interesting comment on our time that a charge of corruption is thought trivial. Or perhaps it is a comment on the status...
...conscience in 20th century letters, Solzhenitsyn poses this question: "What can literature possibly do against the ruthless onslaught of open violence? Let us not forget that violence does not exist by itself and cannot do so; it is necessarily interwoven with lies. Violence finds its only refuge in falsehood, falsehood its only support in violence. Any man who has once acclaimed violence as his method must inexorably choose falsehood as his principle...But writers and artists can achieve more: they can conquer the lie. In the struggle with falsehood, art has always won and always will win! One word...
...artist can distinguish fact from fiction? The Nazi use of radio is rivaled only by the American use of television. As industrial society eats away the old world and drops a substitute behind, we can no longer rely on an obvious disparity between the truth we see and the falsehood we are fed. Our tastes, our pleasures, our thoughts and, at last, our morality become nothing more than conditioned response...