Michael Parenti Quotes

In war, truth is often the first casualty.

The current flows fast and furious. It issues in a spate of words from the loudspeakers and the politicians. Every day they tell us that we are a free people fighting to defend freedom. That is the current that has whirled the young airman up into the sky and keeps him circulating there among the clouds. Down here, with a roof to cover us and a gasmask handy, it is our business to puncture gasbags and discover the seeds of truth.

The first casualty when war comes is truth.

People never lie so much as after a hunt, during a war or before an election.

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.

Propaganda must not serve the truth, especially insofar as it might bring out something favorable to the opponent.... The victor will never be asked if he told the truth.

No one expects a belligerent to tell the truth.

Politics won't allow for the truth.

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

I am particularly horrified by the use of propaganda and the manipulation of the truth and the revision of history.

How do wars start? Diplomats tell lies to journalists, then believe what they read.

Well, politics is war, and in war, truth is the first casualty.

The first casualty in any war is the truth. In World War II, I was part of a group of people who used to meet once a week with the sole purpose of analyzing the news and trying to work out what we weren't being told. We thought that we were clever, but we had absolutely no idea what was really going on. It was only years later that we learned the true story.

A regime that wraps itself in the flag of truth fears truth most of all, for if its story is falsified to the slightest degree, its authority is gone.

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

Everyone, when there's war in the air, learns to live in a new element: falsehood.

The right can distort anything it wants.

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

There are people who are very highly paid to cover the truth and who will protect their clients.

No section of the American populace has been more completely deceived by the forces interested in keeping the truth from the people than America's youth.

In politics, a lie unanswered becomes truth within 24 hours.

Among the calamities of war, may he justly numbered the diminution of the love of truth, by the falsehoods which interest dictates, and credulity encourages.

It is very dangerous to write the truth in war, and the truth is very dangerous to come by.

What's public is propaganda, what's secret is serious.

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.