Linguistic Deception Quotes

How many legs does a dog have if you call his tail a leg? Four. Saying that a tail is a leg doesn't make it a leg.

As a scholar I am interested in the philosophy of language, semiotics, call it what you want, and one of the main features of the human language is the possibility of lying.

Euphemisms are worrisome… Presidential words matter…

Nations … robbed each other in English, and fooled each other in French

Personally I've never put much store by honesty- I mean how can you trust a word whose first letter you don't even pronounce

Words, as is well known, are the greatest foes of reality.

Without precise meanings behind words, politicians and elites can obscure reality and condition people to reflexively associate certain words with positive or negative perceptions. In other words, unpleasant facts can be hidden behind purposely meaningless language.

I'm always interested in how people use language to not say what they mean.

One of our defects as a nation is a tendency to use what have been called "weasel words."

Never underestimate the role pretension plays when it comes to creating euphemistic language.

Another way of verbally masking elite preemption of other people’s decisions is to use the word “ask”—as in “We are just asking everyone to pay their fair share.” But of course governments do not ask, they tell. The Internal Revenue Service does not “ask” for contributions. It takes.

To conceal a want of real ideas, many make for themselves an imposing apparatus of long compound words, intricate flourishes and phrases, new and unheard-of expressions, all of which together furnish an extremely difficult jargon that sounds very learned. Yet with all this they say-precisely nothing.

One of the most misleading representational techniques in our language is the use of the word 'I.'

I perceived that the 'thing' and the 'idea' were taken to be equivalents of feeling, and understood the lie of the world of will and idea. Is the milk bottle the symbol of milk?

Governments produced by the most banal of electoral victories, like those produced by the crudest of coups d'état, will always feel obliged to dress themselves up linguistically in some way.