Margot Kidder Quotes

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.

What they will do is, you know the tabloids. They'll take one element of a story that may be true and they'll build everything around it. Take a picture and invent a story around it.

There was no imminent threat. This was made up in Texas, announced in January to the Republican leadership that war was going to take place and was going to be good politically. This whole thing was a fraud.

Americans detest all lies except lies spoken in public or printed lies.

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.

I don't think I'm an intentional liar, but I'm a little bit of an exaggerator sometimes. If I'm exaggerating, and the journalist exaggerates on top of that, then we end up in funny territory.

People used to complain that selling a president was like selling a bar of soap. But when you buy soap, at least you get the soap. In this campaign you just get two guys telling you they really value cleanliness.

It's not just politicians. Any spokesman for a vested interest is well schooled in how to say what it is they wish to say, which may bear no relation at all to what you've asked them.

Washington culture has always had a difficult time acknowledging untruth.

I wish I was having as much fun as the press reports said I had.

Advertising is legalized lying.

The very hirelings of the press, whose trade it is to buoy up the spirits of the people. have uttered falsehoods so long, they have played off so many tricks, that their budget seems, at last, to be quite empty.

He occasionally stumbled over the truth, but hastily picked himself up and hurried on as if nothing had happened.

Any prediction of the future is certainly a lie in order to sell a position.

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

The phrase 'fake news' sounds too playful, too much like a schoolchild faking illness to get out of a test.

You know, the media always tries to twist things and make things into what they're not.

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 guess entertainment means blatantly lyin'

How Bush and his junta succeeded in deflecting America's anger from bin Laden to Saddam Hussein is one of the great public relations conjuring tricks of history. But they swung it. A recent poll tells us that one in two Americans now believe Saddam was responsible for the attack on the World Trade Centre.

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

There can be no mass movement without some deliberate misrepresentation of facts.

But just before they cut back to the main newscaster, I see the unmistakable flash of that same mockingjay's wing. The reporter has simply been incorporated into the old footage. She's not in District 13 at all. Which begs the question, What is?

What's the harm of a little mystification? It sure beats boring statistical analyses.

A Falsehood is, in one sense, a dead thing; but too often it moves about, galvanized by self-will, and pushes the living out of their seats.