Michael Novak Quotes

Though the Americans can be fooled, as they have been, and they can be propagandized, as they have been... But, as Lincoln said, "You can fool all of the people some of the time, and some of the people all of the time. But you can't fool all of the people all of the time." And so hope lies in the fact that little by little, even if the American people can be fooled, even if they continue to be fooled in the 2004 presidential election, they will gradually learn, as they have learned - for instance, in the Vietnam War and turned against the Vietnam War.

The false prophets of Communism predict a utopian society.

I always divide people into two groups. Those who live by what they know to be a lie, and those who live by what they believe, falsely, to be the truth.

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

He spent his whole life in plastering together the true and the false and therefrom extracting the plausible.

Many people would rather have fine words and false hopes than the truth which is unacceptable.

Political language -- and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists -- is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.

Shouldn't someone tag Mr. Kennedy's 'bold new imaginative program' with its proper age?" Reagan wondered. "Under the tousled boyish haircut it is still old Karl Marx.

The more ideological, the politician, the greater his need for illusion

The revolution of the proletariat was inevitable, good Marxists believed, but if so, why were they so eager to enlist us in their cause? If it was going to happen anyway, it was going to happen with or without our help. But of course the inevitability that Marxists believe in is one that depends on the growth of the movement and all its political action. There were Marxists working very hard to bring about the revolution, and it was comforting to them to believe that their success was guaranteed in the long run. And some of them, the only ones that were really dangerous, believed so firmly in the rightness of their cause that they believed it was permissible to lie and deceive in order to further it. They even taught this to their children, from infancy. These are the "red-diaper babies," children of hardline members of the Communist Party of America, and some of them can still be found infecting the atmosphere of political action in left-wing circles, to the extreme frustration and annoyance of honest socialists and others on the left.

It doesn't benefit me to lie to people. They're eventually going to find out the truth, and then where am I? That's the problem with liberalism and socialism, by the way: it has to be propped up by lies.

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

The Russians have succeeded in one thing: they have sold the world the idea that they represent socialism and the ideas of Marx,and we have done the greatest service to their propaganda by agreeing that that's what it is.

I have been only the humblest jugglers-with-facts; and that, in a country where the truth is what it is instructed to be, reality quite literally ceases to exist, so that everything becomes possible except what we are told is the case; and maybe this was the difference between my Indian childhood and Pakistani adolescence--that in the first I was beset by an infinity of alternative realities, while in the second I was adrift, disoriented, amid an equally infinite number of falsenesses, unrealities and lies.

It's not my fault if reality is Marxist

The Soviet Union tried for 70 years to plant Marxism with bayonets in Eastern Europe. Today there are more Marxists on the Harvard faculty than there are in Eastern Europe.

In other words, all of my books are lies. They are simply maps of a territory, shadows of a reality, gray symbols dragging their bellies across the dead page, suffocated signs full of muffled sound and faded glory, signifying absolutely nothing. And it is the nothing, the Mystery, the Emptiness alone that needs to be realized: not known but felt, not thought but breathed, not an object but an atmosphere, not a lesson but a life.

A politician normally prospers under democracy in proportion ... as he excels in the invention of imaginary perils and imaginary defenses against them.

My dear fellow citizens: For forty years you have heard from my predecessors on this day different variations of the same theme: how our country flourished, how many millions of tons of steel we produced, how happy we all were, how we trusted our government, and what bright perspectives were unfolding in front of us. I assume you did not propose me for this office so that I, too, would lie to you.

Truth, like light, is blinding. Lies, on the other hand, are a beautiful dusk, which enhances the value of each object.

Photography is without mercy--though it's nonsense to say it does not lie. Rather, it lies in a particular, capricious way which makes beggars of ministers and gods of cat's meat men.

The truth is still the truth whether or not you believe it. Can we say the same about lies? No, lies only exist because we believe them. If we don't believe in lies, they simply disappear.

Truth is a naked and open daylight, that does not show the masques, and mummeries, and triumphs of the world, half so stately and daintily as candle-lights. . . A mixture of a lie doth ever add pleasure

The reason why most people are frustrated is because a lie cannot be turned into a truth.

Everything that falls upon the eye is apparition, a sheet dropped over the world's true workings. The nerves and the brain are tricked, and one is left with dreams that these specters loose their hands from ours and walk away, the curve of the back and the swing of the coat so familiar as to imply that they should be permanent fixtures of the world, when in fact nothing is more perishable.