Misinformation Quotes

“The time will come when diligent research over long periods will bring to light things which now lie hidden. A single lifetime, even though entirely devoted to the sky, would not be enough for the investigation of so vast a subject... And so this knowledge will be unfolded only through long successive ages. There will come a time when our descendants will be amazed that we did not know things that are so plain to them... Many discoveries are reserved for ages still to come, when memory of us will have been effaced.”
― Seneca, Natural Questions

“The Dark Forces have created countless troll farms to relentlessly spam the Internet with their agendas. Trillions of fake accounts are used to create disinformation, create a fake majority opinion about topics, bully people who are putting out information the Dark Forces don’t like, and get people arguing with each other to create negative energy.”
― Jasun Ether, The Beasts of Success

“Constantly exposing yourself to popular culture and the mass media will ultimately shape your reality tunnel in ways that are not necessarily conducive to achieving your Soul Purpose and Life Calling. Modern society has generally ‘lost the plot’. Slavishly following its false gods and idols makes no sense in a spiritually aware life.”
― Anthon St. Maarten

“The point of modern propaganda isn't only to misinform or push an agenda. It is to exhaust your critical thinking, to annihilate truth.”
― Garry Kasparov

“Disinformation is duping.
Misinformation is tricking.”
― Toba Beta, Master of Stupidity

“It's okay to be honest about not knowing rather than spreading falsehood. While it is often said that honesty is the best policy, silence is the second best policy.”
― Criss Jami, Killosophy

“In this era of fake news and paid news artificial intelligence is more and more used as a political tool to manipulate and dictate common people, through big data, biometric data, and AI analysis of online profiles and behaviors in social media and smart phones. But the days are not far when AI will also control the politicians and the media too.”
― Amit Ray

“To your request of my opinion of the manner in which a newspaper should be conducted, so as to be most useful, I should answer, ‘by restraining it to true facts & sound principles only.’ Yet I fear such a paper would find few subscribers. It is a melancholy truth, that a suppression of the press could not more compleatly deprive the nation of its benefits, than is done by its abandoned prostitution to falsehood. Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper. Truth itself becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle. The real extent of this state of misinformation is known only to those who are in situations to confront facts within their knolege with the lies of the day. I really look with commiseration over the great body of my fellow citizens, who, reading newspapers, live & die in the belief, that they have known something of what has been passing in the world in their time; whereas the accounts they have read in newspapers are just as true a history of any other period of the world as of the present, except that the real names of the day are affixed to their fables. General facts may indeed be collected from them, such as that Europe is now at war, that Bonaparte has been a successful warrior, that he has subjected a great portion of Europe to his will, &c., &c.; but no details can be relied on. I will add, that the man who never looks into a newspaper is better informed than he who reads them; inasmuch as he who knows nothing is nearer to truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods & errors. He who reads nothing will still learn the great facts, and the details are all false.”
—Letter to John Norvell, 14 June 1807
[Works 10:417--18]”
― Thomas Jefferson, Works of Thomas Jefferson. Including The Jefferson Bible, Autobiography and The Writings of Thomas Jefferson (Illustrated), with Notes on Virginia, Parliamentary ... more.

“Darwin theorized that mankind (both male and female) evolved alongside each other over millions of years, both reproducing after their own kind before the ability to physically have sex evolved. They did this through “asexuality” (“without sexual desire or activity or lacking any apparent sex or sex organs”). Each of them split in half: “Asexual organisms reproduce by fission (splitting in half).”
― Ray Comfort, Nothing Created Everything

“The worst of all of this is the lie that condoms really protect against AIDS. The condom failure rate can be as high as 20 percent. Would you get on a plane — or put your children on a plane — if one of five passengers would be killed on the flight? Well, the statistic holds for condoms, folks.”
― Rush Limbaugh, The Way Things Ought to Be

“This monograph by Special Agent Ken Lanning (1992) is merely a guide for those who may investigate this phenomenon, as the title indicates, and not a study. The author is a well known skeptic regarding cult and ritual abuse allegations and has consulted on a number of cases but to our knowledge has not personally investigated the majority of these cases, some of which have produced convictions. p179
[refers to Lanning, K. V. (1992)
Investigator's guide to allegations of "ritual" child abuse. Quantico, VA: National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime.]”
― Pamela Sue Perskin, Cult and Ritual Abuse: Its History, Anthropology, and Recent Discovery in Contemporary America

“Controlling the internet is a powerful tool for increasingly confident autocracies.”
― Roger Spitz, Disrupt With Impact: Achieve Business Success in an Unpredictable World

“Would you enthusiastically recommend that a friend purchase something you'd never tested yourself? Probably not. But you may be unwittingly doing this with information every day.”
― Dan Ariely, Misbelief: What Makes Rational People Believe Irrational Things

“Truth does not do so much good in the world, as the appearance of it does evil.”
― François de la Rochefoucauld, Maximes

“When I was a kid people used to say one could travel the entire world just by sitting in a library and reading books. Sadly, in the age of billionaire-controlled social media functioning and governing bodies and minds based on carefully engineered algorithms, I don’t believe this is true anymore. The saying should be revised in our times to be ‘one could hate the entire world and see everyone as a villain or an enemy just by browsing through reels and social posts carefully selected to confirm one’s limited knowledge, perspective, and prejudices.’ With that in mind, we need more than ever to master the art of traveling, whether we go near or far. We need to undo the unreasonable, amplified, and exaggerated fear of strangers."

[From “Can We Travel Without Being Tourists?” published on CounterPunch on March 15, 2024]”
― Louis Yako

“Misinformation is the new weapon of mass distraction. Opportunists are using it to start a war or to gain support.Most people are killed, violated, arrested, assaulted, accused, hated, cancelled, sanctioned because of misinformation. Choose to validate everything you read or hear. Choose to scrutinize everything you read and hear so that you don’t become a victim of misinformation .”
― De philosopher DJ Kyos

“That, in fact, is how the American right had come to deal with reality: just throw so much misinformation out there that the public becomes unable to discern fact from fiction—at which point right-wing authoritarians will naturally embrace their lying propaganda. Ex-Trump adviser Stephen Bannon calls it “flooding the zone with shit,” creating so much uncertainty with a barrage of disinformation that many people default to the word of their preferred authority figures.”
― David Neiwert, The Age of Insurrection: The Radical Right's Assault on American Democracy

“Controlling the nation through misinformation.”
― Steven Magee

“imagine a world, however, where coin tosses could not be repeated and there was no way of knowing weather a particular coin toss involved either a scrupulously fair coin, or one that was double-header, or double-tailed. this would represent a world that was more than just risky, it would be deeply uncertain. imagine that all decisions in this world were governed by this fundamentally uncertain coin tosses, on an entirely random basis. some people may do very well, where as others may fail very badly indeed. both the winners and the losers might then be tempted to form their own narratives to explain their successes and failures, the winners extolling their imaginary skills, the losers blaming the winners for their imaginary exploitation.”
― Stephen D. King, Grave New World: The End of Globalization, the Return of History

“The rules were simple, as far as I could tell. Being correct had nothing to do with substance and everything to do with style. The correct answer was a matter of yelling loudly. Whoever yelled the loudest was telling the greatest version of the truth. The title of the show was Objectivity.”
― Joshua Krook, Black Friday 2050: The powerful psychological thriller set in a terrifying high-tech future

“These instruments of darkness tell us the truth and often times lead us to our harm.”
― Wiilliams Shakespear

“Early in life I have noticed that no event is ever correctly reported in a newspaper, but in Spain, for the first time, I saw newspaper reports which did not bear any relation to the facts, not even the relationship which is implied in an ordinary lie. I saw great battles reported where there had been no fighting, and complete silence where hundreds of men had been killed. I saw troops who had fought bravely denounced as cowards and traitors, and others who had never seen a shot fired hailed as heroes of imaginary victories; and I saw newspapers in London retailing these lies and eager intellectuals building emotional superstructures over events that never happened. I saw, in fact, history being written not in terms of what happened but of what ought to have happened according to various 'party lines'.”
― George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia

“It may not be the first line of defense of democratic societies, but it is actually quite near the front because an understanding of history heightens our ability to pierce through the fogs of willful misinformation that constitute lying.”
― Lynn Hunt, History: Why It Matters

“I think everyone knew deep down but didn't want to acknowledge that their beacon of hope was a lie of oppression. I couldn't relate to the excitement that buzzed through people's talk of it, but I understood.
Spirits were fragile. Hope kept them from breaking.”
― Chloe C Peñaranda

“Dune, a Frank Herbert novel set in a not-too-distant future in which the planet has been destroyed by nuclear war. The protagonists take refuge in the desert.”
― Nicole Perlroth, This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends, Chip War & Dead in the Water 3 Books Collection Set

“The first problem with the word “diversity” is the word itself. Who is diverse in relation to whom? The way diversity is often framed in institutional domains implies that some people are diverse in relation to others. That some need to learn diversity while others have it and bring it to the table. This framing, I argue, has from the start driven a wedge between a significant percentage of marginalized and disadvantaged white people and other marginalized and disadvantaged groups—groups that should naturally be allies, not enemies. The only group that benefits from this divide is a small percentage of privileged whites who use the structure of whiteness to their full advantage.
[From "Understanding the DEI Dismantlement” published on Counterpunch on January 31, 2025]”
― Louis Yako

“We hear how diversity and equity are about lowering standards or doing away with them altogether. If DEI initiatives do the work they are supposed to do, they should not be lowering standards. Rather, they should revise and change standards in ways that take into consideration all groups who were never considered when these standards were made.
[From "Understanding the DEI Dismantlement” published on Counterpunch on January 31, 2025]”
― Louis Yako

“Many DEI trainings and narratives have indeed enabled or produced types of people who seem to be looking for excuses to be offended and to construe, sometimes genuine human slips, as intentional micro and macro aggressions. Even worse, the way things have been done has resulted in people who are quick to play identity cards anytime they are confronted with totally unrelated matters like being incompetent in doing their work or other unrelated professional and personal matters. I am in no way condoning or denying the existence of racism, sexism, and countless other forms of exclusions, marginalization, and even violence against so many vulnerable groups and individuals, but I also can’t in good faith ignore the darker side of this coin. For one side to be true, it doesn’t negate the other darker side. In many workplaces and university campuses, we have armies of people who overuse and even abuse the language of ‘feeling violated’ over things like someone mistakenly not referring to them as “they,” but they remain completely silent and unmoved by countless injustices on campus or at work, let alone about atrocities and genocides in the outside world. We have a type that wastes so much time giving themselves and others the ‘permission’ to indulge in selfish acts of complicity, indifference, and silence under the guise of ‘self-care.’

[From "Understanding the DEI Dismantlement” published on Counterpunch on January 31, 2025]”
― Louis Yako

“If misinformation is inaccurate information, and disinformation is deliberate falsehoods — what's a simple way to remember the difference? 'Mis' for mistake, 'D' for deliberate.' I came up with it and it works for me!

(Link to full anthology in profile website)”
― Stewart Stafford

“We want the undiluted form of truth, when, upon hearing it, we would just dilute it again with our biased viewpoint.”
― Stewart Stafford