Alexander Solzhenitsyn,
quoted in 101 Things to Do 'Til the Revolution :
Ideas and Resources for Self-Liberation, Monkey Wrenching and Preparedness
by Claire Wolfe. Page 165
Oliver Goldsmith
The Bee. No. iii. Oct. 20, 1759.
"Our democracy is operating without oxygen. Below are excerpts from a sampling of recent news stories reflecting how every major issue in our society -- war; medicine; integrity in government, in journalism, even in elementary vote-counting in elections -- is drenched in confusion."-- The motto of Mr. Wittenberg's website is: Logic, Clarity, Simplicity, Ethics
"Why do lies pervade the media when truth is available? ...The truth does not seem to count for much where there is an option to have lies instead. AsRevel puts it in the English edition Preface:
"My principal aim has been to examine the venous reasons why human beings so frequently neglect the genuine knowledge that is available to them and prefer to base their conceptions and their actions on false information, even though it is often against their interest to do so. This paradoxical behavior is neither new nor peculiar to our age; but in the twentieth century it has assumed a new intensity, and its absurdity seems all the more mysterious since no civilization has been as organized around knowledge. . ."
In fact, Revel does not explain this behavior, though he carefully dissects numerous fascinating specimens of it."
"Soldiers from Jessica's El Paso, Texas-based 507th Maintenance Company have been warned not to talk. A soldier in that unit said, 'It's almost "say a word and you'll be shot at dawn".'
Jessica has been locked up in a private Walter Reed hospital room with an around-the-clock security detail normally reserved for high brass to ensure that what happened to her as a prisoner of war remains inside her room. Medical personnel who look after her have been given the same keep-your-trap-shut treatment as the 507th troopers. Almost daily, her cover story changes from amnesia to partial amnesia to more recently: 'She's blocked just the ambush event'. "
"It wasn't just the Australians who were mystified by the accumulating US trash (Mid-East intelligence reports). The French, Germans and Russians had long before refused to be persuaded by Washington's line.
"Once again, Americans had been hoaxed into support of actions they might otherwise not have agreed with."
"I miss the good ol' days when the American public would get mad when they were lied to :"-- A page on this site on / Taking Action /
"Fraud is a pathology. I doubt that non-scientists realize how concerned all scientists are to purge any detected incident. The reason for our loathing is not widely understood, and its basis is not abstractly moral. Science must be based on trust. ...-- A page on this site on / Science /
We must believe that the publications of our colleagues are presented in good faith, for only then can we analyze their work to discover errors. Fraud is the worst of all offenses -- a violation of community standards that must be respected and internalized, lest the community die.
Error, on the other hand, falls into the category of unavoidable side consequences to commendable activity .... In any proper taxonomy of scientific activity, error belongs in the category of proper procedure -- for three major reasons:
1. People work this way. We are fallible creatures. Ambiguity defines the richness of our intellectual lives. Computers frustrate us because they display the inhuman property of shutting down when faced with any error or ambiguity; we have had to establish an entire profession -- debugging -- to mediate between our two opposing styles.
2. Work of intellectual daring carries the danger of increased error, in both frequency and consequence. If they wished to avoid all possibility of error, Galileo would have trained his telescope on the next building, and Darwin would have stuck with pigeons. Intrusive regulation by nonscientists is most frightening for this reason; innovation and chanciness will die. Error is the flipside of great discovery. Together they form one coin, and their common currency is brilliance.
3. Error is a spur to correction. Errors promote good science, if only because one-upmanship seems as intrinsically human as error itself. 'False views, if supported by some evidence, do little harm, for every one takes a salutary pleasure in proving their falseness', Darwin wrote, in one of his most famous lines.
Great intellectuals have always understood this principle, and have been accepting of honorable error and fiercely intolerant of fraud."
"This is what I have learned these last two years. That the tragic thing about our public life is not that we are led by liars. It is that they have turned us into a nation of liars. For every time a leader whom ordinary, decent people want nothing more than to trust as a source of authority -- a president, a minister, a leader ... says something untrue, it gets repeated by these decent people as truth. That feels like civic death to me."-- This is, of course, exactly what Orwell warned us about in 1984 and in his essays written at about the same time.
"Scams are nothing new in this world. In fact, they're so old that the warning about them - caveat emptor - comes in Latin. But given how awash in lies we are today, it is no wonder that our politicians feel they can lie to us with impunity. Or, that they frequently get away with it."
"The administration of U.S. President George W. Bush ''systematically misrepresented'' the threat posed by Iraq's weapons of mass destruction (WMD), three non-proliferation experts from a prominent think tank charged Thursday."
... some people seem to have an endless capacity for rationalising what they did, no matter how questionable. We might imagine that these people really know that they’re deceiving themselves, and that their words are mere bravado. But Zoe Chance from Harvard Business School thinks otherwise.
Using experiments where people could cheat on a test, Chance has found that cheaters not only deceive themselves, but are largely oblivious to their own lies. Their ruse is so potent that they’ll continue to overestimate their abilities in the future, even if they suffer for it. Cheaters continue to prosper in their own heads, even if they fail in reality.