Juan Cole Quotes

The Republicans love the truth, but they hate facts.

All politicians operate within an Orwellian nimbus where words don't mean what they normally mean, but Rovism posits that there is no objective, verifiable reality at all. Reality is what you say it is.

I just find it absolutely amazing that the narrative about this situation is not put out publically in the press, because it doesn't suit the Western establishment narrative - that yes, the West has political prisoners, it's a reality, it's not just me, there's a bunch of other people as well.

Never had there been such an opportunity for the dissemination of knowledge…. But the obverse is also true. We can have thrust upon us a false picture of reality as distorting as the trick mirrors in a Coney Island funhouse.

Face it: a nation that maintains a 72% approval rating on George W. Bush is a nation with a very loose grip on reality.

I think the media spends a lot of time fooling itself.

They keep telling us that in war truth is the first casualty, which is nonsense since it implies that in times of peace truth stays out of the sick bay or the graveyard.

I'll see Naomi Wolf on television periodically, I have nothing against her and what she says, but I'll feel that she's a politician, like she's got an agenda to get across and that she doesn't always say what's really true or exactly what she feels.

Are we diminishing the bully pulpit to a pulpit of bull?

What you say about the newspapers is very true ... They are indeed a curious compound of truth and untruth. I am so used to newspaper nonsense and attacks that I do not mind it in the least....

Diplomats lie to journalists, then believe the headlines.

When leaders use words to bludgeon and not to persuade, when opinion supersedes fact and people stop listening to one another, we have, the perfect conditions for the true demagogue. [Donald] Trump is running hard for that role.

“There’s no such thing, unfortunately, anymore as facts.

Power can shape 'truth,' but not forever.

I wish the American public wasn't so stupid if they realized that half the people on television make a living just to insult the other party.

Allegations become facts, and facts become truth in the eyes of the public, whether they are true or not.

What one reads in the newspaper and what one sees on the street are absolutely not the same.

Modi is an excellent orator - sure, anybody who spouts untruths is an excellent orator.

Harry Reid was talking about soup lines, and Hillary Clinton was talking about the economy being on the verge of collapse. Yet, in the same breath, they say that Social Security is rock solid, and there's no crisis there. How are you going to work-you said you're going to reach out to these people-how are you going to work with people who seem to have divorced themselves from reality?

It's quite extraordinary to hear a supposedly learned person call the United States a leading terrorist nation, one of the leading terrorist nations in the world. It's false and very treacherous teaching.

Official truth is not actual truth.

I hope people can stop believing everything politicians say about Mexico and the United States, and the problems that we share.

All it takes is one generation to brainwash a population and convince them that reality doesn't exist

Facts and truth really don't have much to do with each other.

Political debate is more interested in manipulating the truth, than finding the truth.