Francis Alys Quotes

Every edit is a lie.

There are two ways of lying. One, not telling the truth and the other, making up statistics.

It's been unsettling to discover that every form of narrative, even one that purports to tell the truth, is a kind of lying.

Half a truth is often a great lie.

People can lie in letters, but they tend not to. They certainly lie in memoirs.

It is perhaps being economical with the truth.

They were cherry-picking the information that we provided to use whatever pieces of it that fit their overall interpretation. Worse than that, they were dropping qualifiers and distorting some of the information that we provided to make it seem even more alarmist and dangerous than the information that we were giving them.

If you need to fudge the facts a little bit to make your narrative work, there is nothing anyone can do to stop you.

You can't really pretend something is rosier than it is and expect people to buy it.

Seldom, very seldom, does complete truth belong to any human disclosure; seldom can it happen that something is not a little disguised, or a little mistaken.

When you crop the photo, you tell a lie.

I have never seasoned a truth with the sauce of a lie in order to digest it more easily.

The right can distort anything it wants.

There are a terrible lot of lies going about the world, and the worst of it is that half of them are true.

A degree of lying - you know, white lies - seems to be inherent in all languages and all forms of communication.

Working as a journalist, I was always tempted to lie. I felt I could do dialogue better than the person I was interviewing. I felt I could lie better than Nixon and be more concise than some random person I was covering.

In politics, not all lies are all lies. And not all truths are complete.

The average person tells a few white lies.

Advertising is legalized lying.

A half truth is a whole lie.

Lying is one of the techniques of politicians .... They are economical with the truth.

The camera cannot lie. But it can be an accessory to untruth.

Selective truth

It wasn't intelligence — it was propaganda. They'd take a little bit of intelligence, cherry-pick it, make it sound much more exciting, usually by taking it out of context, often by juxtaposition of two pieces of information that don't belong together.

The most dangerous untruths are truths moderately distorted.