Lawrence O'Donnell Quotes

I know every politician spins the truth a little.

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

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.

Journalists say a thing that they know isn't true, in the hope that if they keep on saying it long enough it will be true.

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

Diplomats lie to journalists, then believe the headlines.

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

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.

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

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

In politics, 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.

Sometimes hyperbole and lying are not easily distinguishable [in politics].

Diplomats tell lies to journalists and then believe what they read.

Editorialists who tell downright lies in order to advance their own agendas do more to discredit the press than all the censors in the world.

We’ll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false.

There is a lot of spinning and a lot of lying in our times—in politics, in government, in sports and everywhere. It’s gotten to the point where … you no longer believe the first version of anything. It wasn’t always that way. I guess it started for me with Vietnam, when the establishment felt it had to lie to justify a policy that as it turned out was never going to work.

It seems that the first victim of an Obama campaign is the truth. It seems that the first victim of an Obama campaign is the truth.

I criticize the media for inventing stories.

There are things that go public, and everything that comes out is not the truth.

Trump followed Fox's lead. He parroted what he heard on TV. He lied and lied, but rather than suffer the consequences, his lies were excused and supported and even celebrated by his media enablers.

I wish the media stopped making two and two equal five all the time.

They're feeding the people a line of bull, and they are spinning and people are dying.

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