Paul Johnson Quotes

Euphemisms are unpleasant truths wearing diplomatic cologne.

The more syllables a euphemism has, the further divorced from reality it is.

Hegel says that Truth is a great word and the thing is greater still. With Dave we never seemed to get past the word.

Just because you keep something a secret doesn't mean it never happened, no matter how much you want that to be true.

Truth is not so threadbare as speech, because fewer people can make use of it.

Reality can easily become the current fantasy.

The truth must essentially be regarded as in conflict with this world; the world has never been so good, and will never become so good that the majority will desire the truth.

As long as you seek for something, you will get the shadow of reality and not reality itself.

When people say “clean as a whistle”, they forget that a whistle is full of spit.

Strange to dream in the right shape and build in the wrong shape, but maybe that is what we do every day, never believing that a dream could tell the truth.

In the form of the oeuvre, the actual circumstances are placed in another dimension where the given reality shows itself as that which it is. Thus it tells the truth about itself; its language ceases to be that of deception, ignorance, and submission. Fiction calls the facts by their name and their reign collapses; fiction subverts everyday experience and shows it to be mutilated and false.

Truth lives in the cellar, error on the doorstep.

Life is more or less a lie, but then again, that's exactly the way we want it to be.

The world is a lie...not you and me.

Truth is for tailors and shoemakers. I, on the contrary, have always held that the Lord has a penchant for masquerades.

We live, after all, in a world where illusions are sacred and truth profane.

Reality is modest, it won't be seen naked.

humans are born in truth, but we grow up believing in lies. one of the biggest lies in the story of humanity is the lie of our imperfection.

Words have to murder reality before they can hold it captive.

Illusion never changed into something real.

Illusion is no longer possible, because the real is no longer possible.

Men are apt to be much more influenced by words than by the actual facts of the surrounding reality

A person I knew used to divide human beings into three categories: those who prefer to have nothing to hide rather than being obliged to lie, those who prefer lying to having nothing to hide, and finally those who like both lying and the hidden.

People think that a liar gains a victory over his victim. What I’ve learned is that a lie is an act of self-abdication, because one surrenders one’s reality to the person to whom one lies, making that person one’s master, condemning oneself from then on to faking the sort of reality that person’s view requires to be faked…The man who lies to the world, is the world’s slave from then on…There are no white lies, there is only the blackest of destruction, and a white lie is the blackest of all.

How to achieve such anomalies, such alterations and re-fashionings of reality so what comes out of it are lies, if you like, but lies that are more than literal truth.