Jim Butcher Quotes

Truth is a very powerful political weapon against those who are trying to conceal it.

We now have a whole culture based on the assumption that people know nothing and so anything can be said to them.

I think we're lied to about a number of things.

There are people who are very highly paid to cover the truth and who will protect their clients.

No section of the American populace has been more completely deceived by the forces interested in keeping the truth from the people than America's youth.

What's public is propaganda, what's secret is serious.

We used to think that secrecy was perhaps the greatest enemy of democracy, and as long as there was no suppression or censorship, people could be trusted to make the informed decisions that would preserve our free society, but we have learned in recent years that the techniques of misinformation and misdirection have become so refined that, even in an open society, a cleverly directed flood of misinformation can overwhelm the truth, even though the truth is out there, uncensored, quietly available to anyone who can find it.

We are in the middle of a big swamp of ignorance that is taught by a lot of nonsense, propaganda, absurdity, amalgams. I have a hard time listening to any speech. You feel like you want to stop the TV every two seconds to rephrase them, because it's lie after lie, turning stuff upside down, and you can't follow that. That's the trap.

The oblique paradox of propaganda is that the lie in the throat becomes, by repetition, the truth in the heart.

It's part of the general global hypnotism to accept lies as the new truth.

It's often been observed that the first casualty of war is the truth. But that's a lie, too, in its way. The reality is that, for most wars to begin, the truth has to have been sacrificed a long time in advance.

You just keep feeding hogwash to people, and pretty soon they'll eat it.

Oh it's clearly a cover up. I mean, I have no reluctance in saying that.

The truth is often a terrible weapon of aggression. It is possible to lie, and even to murder, with the truth.

Partial truths or half-truths are often more insidious than total falsehoods.

Make the lie big, make it simple, keep saying it, and eventually they will believe it.

If you tell a big enough lie and tell it frequently enough, it will be believed.

I think 20th century media were about tricking people - and the beauty of the Internet is you can't lie anymore.

It's not a 24-hour news cycle, it's a 60-second news cycle now, it's instantaneous. It has never been easier to get away with telling lies. It has never been easier to get away with the glib one liner.

You don't need a digital David Petraeus or a President Bush avatar to distract you from the truth. You don't need to wait decades to have disinformation beamed into your head. You just need a constant stream of misleading information, half truths, and fictions to be promoted, pushed, and peddled until they are accepted as fact.

Propaganda, to be effective, must be believed. To be believed, it must be credible. To be credible, it must be true.

Any politician or campaigner trying to pull the wool over the eyes of the public won't get very far.

Part of the reason that the government's fear mongering is succeeding is because so many people are so ignorant, that it is easier for government to frighten people in submission.

The first casualty when war comes is truth.

If truth is the first victim of war, then read on - I've got some great lies for you this month.