But insincerity is very troublesome to manage; a man hath so many things to attend to, so many ends to bring together, as make his life a very perplexed and intricate thing. Oportet mendacem esse memorem, “A liar had need of a good memory,” lest he contradict at one time what he said at another: but truth is always consistent with itself, and needs nothing to help it out; it is always near at hand, and sits upon our lips, and is ready to drop out before we are aware: whereas a lie is troublesome, and sets a man’s invention upon the rack, and one trick needs a great many more to make it good.
Quotations about:
truthiness
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I know it is the fashion to say that most of recorded history is lies anyway. I am willing to believe that history is for the most part inaccurate and biased, but what is peculiar to our own age is the abandonment of the idea that history could be truthfully written.
George Orwell (1903–1950) English journalist, essayist, writer [pseud. of Eric Arthur Blair]
Essay (1942-08), “Looking Back on the Spanish War,” ch. 4, Such, Such Were the Joys, essay 8 (1953)
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Obviously the facts are never just coming at you but are incorporated by an imagination that is formed by your previous experience. Memories of the past are not memories of facts but memories of your imaginings of the facts.
Philip Roth (1933–2008) American novelist and short-story writer
The Facts: A Novelist’s Autobiography, Introductory Letter to Nathan Zuckerman (1988)
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Zuckerman was Roth's literary alter ego, and narrator of several of Roth's books.
History is thought of largely in nationalist terms, and such things as the Inquisition, the tortures of the Star Chamber, the exploits of the English buccaneers (Sir Francis Drake, for instance, who was given to sinking Spanish prisoners alive), the Reign of Terror, the heroes of the Mutiny blowing hundreds of Indians from the guns, or Cromwell’s soldiers slashing Irishwomen’s faces with razors, become morally neutral or even meritorious when it is felt that they were done in the “right” cause. If one looks back over the past quarter of a century, one finds that there was hardly a single year when atrocity stories were not being reported from some part of the world; and yet in not one single case were these atrocities — in Spain, Russia, China, Hungary, Mexico, Amritsar, Smyrna — believed in and disapproved of by the English intelligentsia as a whole. Whether such deeds were reprehensible, or even whether they happened, was always decided according to political predilection.
George Orwell (1903–1950) English journalist, essayist, writer [pseud. of Eric Arthur Blair]
Essay (1945-05), “Notes on Nationalism,” Polemic Magazine (1945-10)
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