Harry Frankfurt Quotes
It is impossible for someone to lie unless he thinks he knows the truth. Producing bullshit requires no such conviction.
Quotes to Explore
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Tell the truth.
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I'm always trying to do the impossible to please people. It comes from not being secure in myself and not looking at the things within I have to fix. Sometimes you keep going because you don't want to face the truth.
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When distant and unfamiliar and complex things are communicated to great masses of people, the truth suffers a considerable and often a radical distortion. The complex is made over into the simple, the hypothetical into the dogmatic, and the relative into an absolute.
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People talk about 'getting rid of the old image', and I guess there's some merit in that. But the truth is that people loved 'The Wonder Years' - I can't turn my back on it.
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Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures.
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To tell you the truth, I hadn't seen any Pixar until I went to see 'Wall-E,' and I watched it and I was shocked to see how adult it was, with the setting in our lives, both present and future, and how they dealt with it... And then quite relieved to find that the one I was working on, 'Up,' how adult it was.
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I used to be more paranoid and stressed, constantly worrying about my Plan B. But the truth is I don't have one.
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Of all liars the most arrogant are biographers: those who would have us believe, having surveyed a few boxes full of letters, diaries, bank statements and photographs, that they can play at the recording angel and tell the whole truth about another human life.
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Art is the lie that enables us to realize the truth.
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Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.
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Proficiency in a craft is essential to every artist. Therein lies the prime source of creative imagination. Let us then create a new guild of craftsmen without the class distinctions that raise an arrogant barrier between craftsman and artist!
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At pivotal moments throughout history, there have always been grey areas, and there likely will be in the future. Courage now lies not in the black and white, as in the past, but in the grey.
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They say that the commons of England would first destroy the king's friends and afterward himself, and then bring the Duke of York to be king so that by their false means and lies they may make him to hate and destroy his friends, and cherish his false traitors.
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I believe it is an established maxim in morals that he who makes an assertion without knowing whether it is true or false, is guilty of falsehood; and the accidental truth of the assertion, does not justify or excuse him.
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Truth is what is true, and it's not necessarily factual. Truth and fact are not the same thing. Truth does not contradict or deny facts, but it goes through and beyond facts. This is something that it is very difficult for some people to understand. Truth can be dangerous.
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Your assumption, and the truth, dine at totally separate tables.
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'I'm sure you didn’t mean to hurt anyone.'Madoc Roswyn laughed a soft forlorn laugh. 'The sad truth is that I didn’t care-which may be worse.'
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Truth never was indebted to a lie.
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Do not interrupt the flight of your soul; do not distress what is best in you; do not enfeeble your spirit with half wishes and half thoughts. Ask yourself and keep on asking until you find the answer, for one may have known something many times, acknowledged it; one may have willed something many times, attempted it - and yet, only the deep inner motion, only the heart's indescribable emotion, only that will convince you that what you have acknowledged belongs to you, that no power can take it from you - for only the truth that builds up is truth for you.
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If you do not ask yourself what it is you know, you will go on listening to others and change will not come because you will not hear your own truth.
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Love is begun by time and time qualifies the spark and fire of it.
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That first responsibility as a school board member - meals for latch-key children - was absolutely critical in my understanding of the extraordinary problems of poverty.
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It is impossible for someone to lie unless he thinks he knows the truth. Producing bullshit requires no such conviction.
