A Quote by Harry Frankfurt

It is impossible for someone to lie unless he thinks he knows the truth. Producing bullshit requires no such conviction. — © Harry Frankfurt
It is impossible for someone to lie unless he thinks he knows the truth. Producing bullshit requires no such conviction.
It is impossible for someone to lie unless he thinks he knows the truth. A person who lies is thereby responding to the truth, and he is to that extent respectful of it.
We can lie in the language of dress or try to tell the truth; but unless we are naked and bald, it is impossible to be silent.
We can lie in the language of dress or try ot tell the truth; but unless we are naked and bald, it is impossible to be silent.
A friend is someone who understands your past, believes in your future, and accepts you just the way you are. Truly great friends are hard to find, difficult to leave, and impossible to forget. A true friend is someone who thinks that you are a good egg even though he knows that you are slightly cracked.
Someone once said to me, 'Some of us choose to live with a lifeboat just a little bit out of our reach.' I'd like to reach a point where I no longer bullshit myself. I think that's the natural human condition - to lie to yourself. Because the truth is painful.
One can't be a successful investor without a healthy dose of confidence. To commit your own and others' hard-earned capital requires conviction, and conviction requires confidence. But as with fine brandy or coffee ice cream, too much of a good thing can be problematic.
you cannot make a person believe anything unless that person has already had a conscious or unconscious vision of the same thing; you have no conviction of truth unless you have already apprehended it intuitively.
Where's the activism? Nobody knows. And anyone who thinks they know, like Todd Gitlin, has their head up their ass. Nobody knows. The day before every revolution that's ever happened, that revolution was impossible. The day before Rosa Parks, that was impossible. The day after, it was inevitable.
We lie. That's what we do. You're selling me a line of bullshit and you want me to sell you a line of bullshit back so you can write a major line of bullshit and be paid for it.
It is impossible for a man to learn what he thinks he already knows.
It is impossible to begin to learn that which one thinks one already knows.
Who thinks of justice unless he knows injustice?
Who does Not Know the Truth, is simply a Fool... Yet who Knows the Truth and Calls it a Lie, is a Criminal.
Glorify a lie, legalize a lie, arm and equip a lie, consecrate a lie with solemn forms and awful penalties, and after all it is nothing but a lie. It rots a land and corrupts a people like any other lie, and by and by the white light of God's truth shines clear through it, and shows it to be a lie.
Someone who lies and someone who tells the truth are playing on opposite sides, so to speak, in the same game. Each responds to the facts as he understands them, although the response of the one is guided by the authority of the truth, while the response of the other defies that authority and refuses to meet its demands. The bullshitter ignores these demands altogether. He does not reject the authority of the truth, as the liar does, and oppose himself to it. He pays no attention to it at all. By virtue of this, bullshit is a greater enemy of the truth than lies are.
How do you play someone in a movie? How do you do that? It's impossible - unless you know how. How do you cut somebody open and take out their appendix and sew them back up and watch them get well? That's impossible - unless you know how.
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