A Quote by William J. Brennan

There is no such thing as a false idea.

William J. Brennan

Quote Topics

False Idea Thing

Quote Author

William J. Brennan
American - Judge
April 25, 1906 - July 24, 1997

He, who knows how to distinguish between true and false, must have an adequate idea of true and false.

Baruch Spinoza

It is always the false that makes you suffer, the false desires and fears, the false values and ideas, the false relationships between people. Abandon the false and you are free of pain; truth makes happy, truth liberates.

Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

There are no hard distinctions between what is real and what is unreal, nor between what is true and what is false. A thing is not necessarily either true or false; it can be both true and false.

Harold Pinter

Under the First Amendment there is no such thing as a false idea. However pernicious an opinion may seem, we depend for its correction not on the conscience of judges and juries but on the competition of other ideas.

Lewis F. Powell, Jr.

The hardest part of gaining any new idea is sweeping out the false idea occupying that niche.

Robert A. Heinlein

English can be tricky because there are so many false cognates, but sometimes, as long the idea conveyed is not wrong, these false cognates can themselves offer synonyms or lead to a better alternative word or phrase in translation.

Adam Morris

There is a false modesty, which is vanity; a false glory, which is levity; a false grandeur, which is meanness; a false virtue, which is hypocrisy, and a false wisdom, which is prudery.

Jean de la Bruyere

The idea shared by many that life is a vale of tears is just as false as the idea shared by the great majority, the idea to which youth and health and riches incline you, that life is a place of entertainment.

Leo Tolstoy

The idea that information can be stored in a changing world without an overwhelming depreciation of its value is false. It is scarcely less false than the more plausible claim that after a war we may take our existing weapons, fill their barrels with information.

Norbert Wiener

All of Vegas is false. There's a false Paris, a false Venice, a false Baghdad - in fact, all of the early Vegas aesthetic is Baghdad, which is also the irony. It's 'Aladdin,' the sands, 'One Thousand and One Nights.'

Robert Lepage

The creative phase of an idea coincides with the period during which it insists, cantankerously, on its boundaries, on what makes it different; but an idea becomes false and impotent when it seeks reconciliation, at cut-rate prices, with other ideas.

Susan Sontag

There never was a false god, nor was there ever really a false religion, unless you call a child a false man.

Max Muller

Ideas improve. The meaning of words participates in the improvement. Plagiarism is necessary. Progress implies it. It embraces an author's phrase, makes use of his expressions, erases a false idea, and replaces it with the right idea.

Guy Debord

Generally speaking, only simple conceptions can grip the mind of a nation. An idea that is clear and precise even though false will always have greater power in the world than an idea that is true but complex.

Alexis de Tocqueville

Hindu nationalist outfits like the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh perpetuate a false notion of the 'love jihad' - the false idea that young Muslim men are making Hindu girls fall in love with them to trick them into converting to Islam.