David Frum Quotes

By oft repeating an untruth, men come to believe it themselves.

Lie until even you believe it - that's the real secret of lying

A lie told often enough becomes the truth.

The rule seems to be that those who find no difficulty in deceiving themselves are easily deceived by others. They are easily persuaded and led.

A reliable way to make people believe in falsehoods is frequent repetition, because familiarity is not easily distinguished from truth. Authoritarian institutions and marketers have always known this fact.

What is it men cannot be made to believe!

Human beings seem to have an almost unlimited capacity to deceive themselves, and to deceive themselves into taking their own lies for truth.

If you asked me what makes the world go round, I would say self-deception. Self-deception allows us to create a consistent narrative for ourselves that we actually believe. I’m not saying that the truth doesn’t matter. It does. But self-deception is how we survive.

If you repeat something long enough people believe it's what happened.

The oblique paradox of propaganda is that the lie in the throat becomes, by repetition, the truth in the heart.

I have always loved truth so passionately that I have often resorted to lying as a way of introducing it into the minds which were ignorant of its charms.

I've always operated under the notion that audiences don't always know when they're being lied to, but that they always know when they're being told the truth.

The best measure of a man's honesty isn't his income tax return. It's the zero adjust on his bathroom scale.

We are never deceived; we deceive ourselves.

Propaganda does not deceive people; it merely helps them to deceive themselves.

The third time you say a thing it sounds like a lie.

The truth is, I've never fooled anyone. I've let men sometimes fool themselves.

When a person cannot deceive himself the chances are against his being able to deceive other people.

You cannot 'rationalize' what is not rational to begin with - as if lying were called 'truthization.' There is no way to obtain more truth for a proposition by bribery, flattery, or the most passionate argument - you can make more people believe the proposition, but you cannot make it more true.

Truthful words are not beautiful; beautiful words are not truthful. Good words are not persuasive; persuasive words are not good.

Athletics carries its own set of truths, and those truths are diminished when manipulated by people with agendas.

Self-justification is a treacherous servant.

I'm not lying to myself like most people.

The art of living is the art of knowing how to believe lies.

Anybody can make something up and have it sound believable. The hard part is remembering all the lies you've told, and all the people you've told them to, and then living the lies that have become your life.