Frank Bruni Quotes

There's a danger in the internet and social media. The notion that information is enough, that more and more information is enough, that you don't have to think, you just have to get more information - gets very dangerous.

Those of our people who do not study history can be duped into believing anything.

Search engines take misinformation and put it into our echo chamber. Trying to counter it is the functional equivalent of having your hair full of honey and bees and your trying to whack the bees with your hands.

People are stupid; given proper motivation, almost anyone will believe almost anything. Because people are stupid, they will believe a lie because they want to believe it's true, or because they are afraid it might be true. People’s heads are full of knowledge, facts, and beliefs, and most of it is false, yet they think it all true. People are stupid; they can only rarely tell the difference between a lie and the truth, and yet they are confident they can, and so are all the easier to fool.

We have Internet now and people are not stupid. But it seems that some people are trying to push the same agenda of the Cold War of conspiracy theories and amazing achievements that are very easily traced and validated.

There's so much active misinformation and it's packaged very well and it looks the same when you see it on a Facebook page or you turn on your television. If everything seems to be the same and no distinctions are made, then we won't know what to protect.

One of the chief obstacles to intelligence is credulity, and credulity could be enormously diminished by instructions as to the prevalent forms of mendacity. Credulity is a greater evil in the present day than it ever was before, because, owing to the growth of education, it is much easier than it used to be to spread misinformation, and, owing to democracy, the spread of misinformation is more important than in former times to the holders of power.

The public is gullible. ... If [many satirists are] making the same joke, that's the danger. Then there's a solidifying effect and it becomes a truth.

No matter how smart or well-educated you are, you can be deceived.

If you go and talk to most people, they mean well but they don't have much of a breadth on education, of knowledge of understanding what the real issues are and therefore they listen to pundits on television who tell them what they are supposed to think and they keep repeating that until pretty soon they say, 'Oh, well that must be true.'

Man's mind is so formed that it is far more susceptible to falsehood than to truth.

Opinions are 10 a penny. In the spin-driven, PR-controlled world of the 21st century, hard facts are rare indeed.

Propaganda does not deceive people; it merely helps them to deceive themselves.

Young people don't really study the facts; they watch the skewed MSNBC and get a primarily liberal education.

True, a little learning is a dangerous thing, but it still beats total ignorance.

The problem with the Internet is that it gives you everything - reliable material and crazy material. So the problem becomes, how do you discriminate?

I think it's a myth that American public or any other public is so stupid that they need to be constantly pricked.

We binge on instant knowledge, but we are learning the hazards, and readers are warier than they used to be of nanosecond-interpretations of Supreme Court decisions.

Beware of false knowledge; it is more dangerous than ignorance.

In the world of the Internet, there are many falsehoods. Anyone can write stuff on Wikipedia, and it doesn't have to be true.

It is very dangerous to write the truth in war, and the truth is very dangerous to come by.

Even intelligent people succumb to their own propaganda.

The Internet is an open sewer of unfiltered, untreated information. The Internet can make you smarter, faster than anything else in the world. It can also make you dumber faster.

A labouring man ... read and study halfe his time, and then be at a loss to know what is true and what not. Thus the few have almost ruined the Libberty of the press.

An educated person is one who has learned that information almost always turns out to be at best incomplete and very often false, misleading, fictitious, mendacious—just dead wrong.