John le Carre Quotes

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

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.

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

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

It is hard to tell which is worse; the wide diffusion of things that are not true, or the suppression of things that are true.

Palestinian propagandists can say and do anything they please without concern for the truth, in the belief that if they repeat it often enough it will simply become the truth.

Some experts believe that somebody is deceiving WikiLeaks, that its reputation is being undermined in order for it to be used for political purposes.

A lie told often enough becomes the truth.

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.

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

Errors, to be dangerous, must have a great deal of truth mingled with them. It is only from this alliance that they can ever obtain an extensive circulation.

Castro has lived almost his entire life as a clandestine revolutionary. To such figures, truth is always malleable, always subservient to political goals.

It is well known that in war, the first casualty is truth - that during any war truth is forsaken for propaganda.

Half a truth is often a great lie.

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

The public will believe anything, so long as it is not founded on truth.

Campaigns exaggerate or oversimplify the truth because it’s effective.

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

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.

In this crazy political business, at least in our times, a lie unanswered becomes truth within 24 hours.

Of all newspaper presses, I never heard anyone deny that the American is the worst.... [N]othing is easier than to make the people know only one side of a question; few things are easier than to keep them altogether from the knowledge of any particular affair; and, worse than all, on them [the American people] may easily be practiced the discovery that lies may work their intended effect, before the truth can overtake them. It is hard to tell which is worse; the wide diffusion of things that are not true or the suppression of things that are.

Selective truth

The administration shaded the truth … I was part of the propaganda campaign.

The most dangerous untruths are truths moderately distorted.

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