Samuel P. Huntington Quotes
Total falsehoods can be easily exposed for what they are by citing exceptions to their claims. Hence, they are less likely to be accepted as the total truth.
Huntington, Samuel P. Who Are We? The Challenges to America's National Identity. Simon & Schuster, 2004, p. 17.
See {115604} for a similar sentiment from England.
Ryan told the national audience that President Obama had come to a factory in his district that as rumored to be closed. Obama had told the workers that the Federal government could assist and keep the factory open for many years. Then as Ryan explained, the factory closed the following year. He gave this as an example of Obama not keeping his word. However what Ryan did not say was that Obama had made the speech at the factory when he was a candidate for the Presidency, and then the factory was closed while George W. Bush was President and by the time he took office, the closure was done and the factory machines gone. And when Obama took office, our national economy was within days of complete bank and finance collapse. Obama saved most of the banks and then the American automobile industry. To suggest that Obama could have or should have done something for the factory that closed was shockingly misleading. It would have been a minor issue if some party hack had lied and made the same accusation. But this was the Vice Presidential Candidate whose acceptance speech was assumedly vetted by the Presidential Candidate’s staff. That is why the quotation was so memorable.
Quintus Horatius Flaccus. The incessant concentration on things that are false exhibited by the kinds of people Horace described has been observed in the political scene of almost all eras. The preoccupation with witches was one of the most famous, and a very recent one was the large number of people who were attracted by the belief that President Barack Obama was a Muslim who was born abroad despite the fact that Obama had been a regular attendant at Christian Protestant Churches for his adult like and had never worshipped in a Mosque. The “birthers” focused on the falsehood that Obama was not born in America despite the facts that there were contemporaneous newspaper announcements of his birth in Hawaii and the State of Hawaii authenticated his Hawaiian birth certificate.
Samuel Phillips Huntington was an American political scientist, adviser and academic. He spent more than half a century at Harvard University, where he was director of Harvard's Center for International Affairs and the Albert J. Weatherhead III University Professor.
