Harry Frankfurt Quotes

Bullshit is unavoidable whenever circumstance require someone to talk without knowing what he is talking about.

One of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much bullshit. Everyone knows this. Each of us contributes his share. But we tend to take the situation for granted. Most people are rather confident of their ability to recognize bullshit and to avoid being taken in by it. So the phenomenon has not aroused much deliberate concern, or attracted much sustained inquiry. In consequence, we have no clear understanding of what bullshit is, why there is so much of it, or what functions it serves.

It is impossible for someone to lie unless he thinks he knows the truth. Producing bullshit requires no such conviction.

Just because you have a blog doesn't mean that you should, like, lie for no reason.

If what is communicated is false, it can hardly be called communication.

Politicians are better liars than writers.

I'm just a propagandist and a propagandist doesn't have to know what he is talking about, just so he talks about it most convincingly.

Reason and truth have rarely prevailed against demagoguery when the audience is too ignorant to tell the difference.

There are many other ways in which language can be used to manipulate an audience. one obvious way is to simply lie.

Stupidity is active in every direction, and can dress up in all the clothes of truth. Truth, on the other hand, has for every occasion only one dress and one path, and is always at a disadvantage.

Bullshit is truly the American soundtrack.

Talking with most people usually involves a search for truth. Talking with congressmen is strictly special effects.

Falsehood, like the dry-rot, flourishes the more in proportion as air and light are excluded.

Elvis is English, and climbs the hills. Can't tell the bullshit from the lies.

Do you want to live in a world where a man lies about calories?

The bullshitter is neither on the side of the true or the side of the false. His eye is not on the facts at all. He does not reject the authority of the truth, as the liar does, and oppose himself to it. He pays no attention to it at all. By virtue of this, bullshit is a greater enemy of the truth than lies are.

It takes one minute to tell a lie, and an hour to refute it.

I do believe that is a template that I stick very strongly to to tell the truth in an increasing swelter of lies and misinformation and disinformation.

Know that Truth sees through bullshit. So if you can't handle looking at Truth, you must be a Devil's culprit.

Americans need bullshit the way koala bears need eucalyptus leaves. They've become totally addicted to it. They get so much of it back home that they can't survive without it.

Plain lies are dangerous.

At no time did I intend to, or do I believe that I did put forward false information to the American people.

He had then warned his daughter not to violate the Eleventh Commandment. "Which one is that?" I asked her. "Do not bullshit thy father," she said.

The only person to blame is the person making up the bullshit.

You listen to a politician making a speech, and it is like hearing nothing. Whereas, music is unmistakably music. The thing about music is that nobody listens to it unless it's real. I don't think that you can fool anybody for too long in music. And you certainly can't fool everybody.