A Quote by Thornton Wilder

A convention is an agreed-upon falsehood, a permitted lie.

Thornton Wilder

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Agreed Convention Falsehood Lie Permitted

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Thornton Wilder
American - Novelist
April 17, 1897 - December 7, 1975

Sweet exists by convention, bitter by convention, color by convention; but in reality atoms and the void alone exist

Democritus

Man demands truth and fulfills this demand in moral intercourse with other men; this is the basis of all social life. One anticipates the unpleasant consequences of reciprocal lying. From this there arises the duty of truth. We permit epic poets to lie because we expect no detrimental consequences in this case. Thus the lie is permitted where it is considered something pleasant. Assuming that it does no harm, the lie is beautiful and charming.

Friedrich Nietzsche

I think this was as good a Democratic Convention [ this was my 24th convention] as I have seen since the 1976 convention, which nominated Jimmy Carter.I just thought it was a spectacularly successful convention. I don't think Hillary Clinton's speech was spectacular, but I don't think she's a spectacular speaker.

Mark Shields

Grow your tree of falsehood from a small grain of truth. Do not follow those who lie in contempt of reality. Let your lie be even more logical than the truth itself, so the weary travelers may find repose.

Czeslaw Milosz

Art flouts convention. Convention became convention because it works.

Stewart Brand

Democritus sometimes does away with what appears to the senses, and says that none of these appears according to truth but only according to opinion: the truth in real things is that there are atoms and void. 'By convention sweet', he says, 'by convention bitter, by convention hot, by convention cold, by convention colour: but in reality atoms and void.'

Sextus Empiricus

What is the truth, but a lie agreed upon.

Friedrich Nietzsche

A small lie, if it actually is a lie, condemns a man as much as a big and black falsehood. If a man will deliberately cheat to the amount of a single cent, give him opportunity and he would cheat to any amount.

Edwin Hubbel Chapin

History is the lie commonly agreed upon.

Voltaire

History is a lie commonly agreed upon.

Oscar Wilde

The dull flat falsehood serves for policy, and in the cunning, truth's itself a lie.

Alexander Pope

The result of a consistent and total substitution of lies for factual truth is not that the lie will now be accepted as truth, and truth be defamed as lie, but that the sense by which we take our bearings in the real world - and the category of truth versus falsehood is among the mental means to this end - is being destroyed.

Hannah Arendt

Let us not forget that violence does not live alone and is not capable of living alone: it is necessarily interwoven with falsehood. Between them lies the most intimate, the deepest of natural bonds. Violence finds its only refuge in falsehood, falsehood its only support in violence. Any man who has once acclaimed violence as his method must inexorably choose falsehood as his principle.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Now what I love in women is, they won't Or can't do otherwise than lie, but do it. So well, the very truth seems falsehood to it.

Lord Byron

The godfather of the modern Mississippi Republican Party, Charles Pickering, left the Democrats in 1964 because the party's national convention agreed to seat two black delegates.

Steve Kornacki

I was forced to lie to my father by doctors and relatives. I made that choice and agreed with them, and I will never, ever get over it. If I hear a lie in my life with my children, with my wife, my work, my audiences, I want to annihilate myself, vaporize myself, and wipe myself off the face of the earth.

Mandy Patinkin

A Quote by Thornton Wilder

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