Kathleen Hall Jamieson Quotes

The most dangerous untruths are truths moderately distorted.

Accusations fit on a bumper sticker. The truth is longer.

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.

Politicians learn to turn the truth into something that they want the truth to be.

A lie told often enough becomes the truth.

Almost all political campaigns involve falsity and playacting.

The permanent campaign is inherently deceptive.

I know every politician spins the truth a little.

Half a truth is often a great lie.

Advertising is legalized lying.

The expressions of newspapers, like those of orators, could not be accepted without allowance, for they aimed at producing some desired effect, and said either more or less than the truth.

We are apt to be deluded into false security by political catchwords, devised to flatter rather than instruct.

In politics where immediate success is attained by saying what people can be made to believe, rather than what is demonstrably true, accent is generally placed on the desirable rather than on the possible.

Selective truth

When politics comes in the door, truth goes out the window.

A falsehood, to have its full and lasting effect, must contain a fraction of a grain of truth.

Charlatanism of some degree is indispensable to effective leadership. There can be no mass movement without some deliberate misrepresentation of facts.

It is twice as hard to crush a half-truth as a whole lie.

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.

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

With a fascist the problem is never how best to present the truth to the public but how best to use the news to deceive the public into giving the fascist and his group more money or more power.

Political commercials encourage the deceptive, the destructive and the degrading.

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

I feel sad when I realize how much truth is being changed or obscured in the American media.