Misinformation Quotes

“The time will come when diligent research over long periods will bring to light things which now lie hidden. A single lifetime, even though entirely devoted to the sky, would not be enough for the investigation of so vast a subject... And so this knowledge will be unfolded only through long successive ages. There will come a time when our descendants will be amazed that we did not know things that are so plain to them... Many discoveries are reserved for ages still to come, when memory of us will have been effaced.”
― Seneca, Natural Questions

“The Dark Forces have created countless troll farms to relentlessly spam the Internet with their agendas. Trillions of fake accounts are used to create disinformation, create a fake majority opinion about topics, bully people who are putting out information the Dark Forces don’t like, and get people arguing with each other to create negative energy.”
― Jasun Ether, The Beasts of Success

“Constantly exposing yourself to popular culture and the mass media will ultimately shape your reality tunnel in ways that are not necessarily conducive to achieving your Soul Purpose and Life Calling. Modern society has generally ‘lost the plot’. Slavishly following its false gods and idols makes no sense in a spiritually aware life.”
― Anthon St. Maarten

“The point of modern propaganda isn't only to misinform or push an agenda. It is to exhaust your critical thinking, to annihilate truth.”
― Garry Kasparov

“Disinformation is duping.
Misinformation is tricking.”
― Toba Beta, Master of Stupidity

“It's okay to be honest about not knowing rather than spreading falsehood. While it is often said that honesty is the best policy, silence is the second best policy.”
― Criss Jami, Killosophy

“In this era of fake news and paid news artificial intelligence is more and more used as a political tool to manipulate and dictate common people, through big data, biometric data, and AI analysis of online profiles and behaviors in social media and smart phones. But the days are not far when AI will also control the politicians and the media too.”
― Amit Ray

“The masses are not interested in the truth… they want to be entertained.”
― Rohith S. Katbamna, Gulab

“To your request of my opinion of the manner in which a newspaper should be conducted, so as to be most useful, I should answer, ‘by restraining it to true facts & sound principles only.’ Yet I fear such a paper would find few subscribers. It is a melancholy truth, that a suppression of the press could not more compleatly deprive the nation of its benefits, than is done by its abandoned prostitution to falsehood. Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper. Truth itself becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle. The real extent of this state of misinformation is known only to those who are in situations to confront facts within their knolege with the lies of the day. I really look with commiseration over the great body of my fellow citizens, who, reading newspapers, live & die in the belief, that they have known something of what has been passing in the world in their time; whereas the accounts they have read in newspapers are just as true a history of any other period of the world as of the present, except that the real names of the day are affixed to their fables. General facts may indeed be collected from them, such as that Europe is now at war, that Bonaparte has been a successful warrior, that he has subjected a great portion of Europe to his will, &c., &c.; but no details can be relied on. I will add, that the man who never looks into a newspaper is better informed than he who reads them; inasmuch as he who knows nothing is nearer to truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods & errors. He who reads nothing will still learn the great facts, and the details are all false.”
—Letter to John Norvell, 14 June 1807
[Works 10:417--18]”
― Thomas Jefferson, Works of Thomas Jefferson. Including The Jefferson Bible, Autobiography and The Writings of Thomas Jefferson (Illustrated), with Notes on Virginia, Parliamentary ... more.

“The worst of all of this is the lie that condoms really protect against AIDS. The condom failure rate can be as high as 20 percent. Would you get on a plane — or put your children on a plane — if one of five passengers would be killed on the flight? Well, the statistic holds for condoms, folks.”
― Rush Limbaugh, The Way Things Ought to Be

“Darwin theorized that mankind (both male and female) evolved alongside each other over millions of years, both reproducing after their own kind before the ability to physically have sex evolved. They did this through “asexuality” (“without sexual desire or activity or lacking any apparent sex or sex organs”). Each of them split in half: “Asexual organisms reproduce by fission (splitting in half).”
― Ray Comfort, Nothing Created Everything

“Controlling the internet is a powerful tool for increasingly confident autocracies.”
― Roger Spitz, Disrupt With Impact: Achieve Business Success in an Unpredictable World

“This monograph by Special Agent Ken Lanning (1992) is merely a guide for those who may investigate this phenomenon, as the title indicates, and not a study. The author is a well known skeptic regarding cult and ritual abuse allegations and has consulted on a number of cases but to our knowledge has not personally investigated the majority of these cases, some of which have produced convictions. p179
[refers to Lanning, K. V. (1992)
Investigator's guide to allegations of "ritual" child abuse. Quantico, VA: National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime.]”
― Pamela Sue Perskin, Cult and Ritual Abuse: Its History, Anthropology, and Recent Discovery in Contemporary America

“Should data be treated as a language, as fundamental to our existence as our linguistic substrates?”
― Roger Spitz, Disrupt With Impact: Achieve Business Success in an Unpredictable World

“...the true assassin of a viral lie is not rigorous fact-checking. It is, ultimately, fatigue.”
― Anurag Minus Verma, The Great Indian Brain Rot : Love, Lies and Algorithms in Digital India

“Many DEI trainings and narratives have indeed enabled or produced types of people who seem to be looking for excuses to be offended and to construe, sometimes genuine human slips, as intentional micro and macro aggressions. Even worse, the way things have been done has resulted in people who are quick to play identity cards anytime they are confronted with totally unrelated matters like being incompetent in doing their work or other unrelated professional and personal matters. I am in no way condoning or denying the existence of racism, sexism, and countless other forms of exclusions, marginalization, and even violence against so many vulnerable groups and individuals, but I also can’t in good faith ignore the darker side of this coin. For one side to be true, it doesn’t negate the other darker side. In many workplaces and university campuses, we have armies of people who overuse and even abuse the language of ‘feeling violated’ over things like someone mistakenly not referring to them as “they,” but they remain completely silent and unmoved by countless injustices on campus or at work, let alone about atrocities and genocides in the outside world. We have a type that wastes so much time giving themselves and others the ‘permission’ to indulge in selfish acts of complicity, indifference, and silence under the guise of ‘self-care.’

[From "Understanding the DEI Dismantlement” published on Counterpunch on January 31, 2025]”
― Louis Yako

“If misinformation is inaccurate information, and disinformation is deliberate falsehoods — what's a simple way to remember the difference? 'Mis' for mistake, 'D' for deliberate.' I came up with it and it works for me!

(Link to full anthology in profile website)”
― Stewart Stafford

“We want the undiluted form of truth, when, upon hearing it, we would just dilute it again with our biased viewpoint.”
― Stewart Stafford

“Confabulation, or hallucination, is ubiquitous in AI/GPT output already. Efforts to correct this by self-learning algos and back propagation are unlikely to solve the problem because they add to the complexity of the system as a whole, which increases the likelihood of emergent ghosts. The difficulty is that duplicity is hard to detect unless you're a subject matter expert in the topic or you conduct your own research to test its accuracy. This begs the question — if you have to be a subject matter expert to spot the flaws in AI/GPT output, what good is the system in the first place?”
― James Rickards, MoneyGPT: AI and the Threat to the Global Economy

“These days, it seems as though we’ve all gotten used to having people like that in our lives—friends, family members, or colleagues with whom we carefully restrict our conversations. Perhaps they’re just casual acquaintances on social media, but they may also be people we know intimately. I’d be willing to bet that almost everyone reading this knows someone who has undergone a dramatic shift in their deep beliefs about health, the media, the government, the pharmaceutical industry, and more over the last few years. They may not suddenly believe that the earth is flat (though a surprising number of people do). But they may well deny the existence of Covid-19 or think it’s a bioweapon. They may refuse to admit the legitimacy of the 2020 US presidential election or think that Antifa staged the storming of the Capitol. They may insist on telling the real story behind the assassination of John F. Kennedy, climate change, the events of 9/11, or the death of Princess Diana. Some may confidently declare that all vaccines are evil. Others think that antivaxxers are actually lizard people who came up with an ingenious plot to destroy humanity. (Okay, the last one was made up by the folks behind the ScienceSaves campaign to promote vaccines. But you get my point.)

It sometimes seems that the growing tide of misinformation and false beliefs has left no community or family unscathed. And jokes about lizard people aside, it’s no longer something we laugh about. When you hear the words conspiracy theory, what comes to mind probably isn’t tinfoil hats or little green men; it’s much more serious and more personal. Anytime I mention this topic, I see pained expressions. People shake their heads and tell me about their friend, their cousin, their parents, their in-laws, their kids. The ones they’re afraid to invite to parties or family events. The ones they can’t talk to at all. They just can’t wrap their minds around how that person ended up believing those things.”
― Dan Ariely, Misbelief: What Makes Rational People Believe Irrational Things

“From unintentional hallucinations of large language models to deliberate disinformation campaigns, the very foundation of truth is under attack, with facts as the first casualty.”
― Roger Spitz, Disrupt With Impact: Achieve Business Success in an Unpredictable World

“What is the flow and impact of disinformation? How is the disinformation spreading and what are its effects?”
― Roger spitz, Disrupt With Impact: Achieve Business Success in an Unpredictable World

“Information, misinformation, disinformation. We might not know what to call it, but we certainly are drowning in it.”
― Roger Spitz, Disrupt With Impact: Achieve Business Success in an Unpredictable World

“When a widely held opinion is glaringly at odds with the truth, we are bond in honesty, I think, to attack it.”
― Marc Bloch, Strange Defeat

“At the desk where I sit, I have learned one great truth. The answer to our national problems -- the answer for all the problems of the world -- comes down to a single word. That word is 'education.”
― Lyndon B. Johnson

“We are living through an absolutely crucial juncture in human history, when the externalities of our current economic system are coming home to roost. These include misinformation (courtesy of 'Big Tech'), global heating (thanks to 'Big Oil'), and wealth inequality (exacerbated by neoliberal economic policies). Together, these interlocking crises are buffeting our political institutions, threatening to envelop them in a vortex of partisanship and chronic instability. Looming over these challenges is the threat of societal disruption from AI and the imminent collapse of a rules-based international order. At such a time, what we need more than ever is a big vision, a narrative to help people make sense of the bewildering world we live in, and political courage. Both things that seem distinctly lacking from our political class.”
― Matt Hay, Reforesting Scotland 72: Autumn/Winter 2025

“Today is the best time to confront the lies that your yesterday is telling you.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough

“...the internet has profoundly decentralised propaganda.”
― Anurag Minus Verma, The Great Indian Brain Rot : Love, Lies and Algorithms in Digital India

“when humans don’t understand why something happens, we make it up.
Why does the sun rise in the east and set in the west? That’s the direction of the Greek god Helios’s chariot.
How did zebras get stripes? A zebra got burned walking through a baboon’s fire.
How did the novel coronavirus spread so quickly? 5G towers.”
― Ashely Alker, MD, 99 Ways to Die: And How to Avoid Them

“The rate of refusal of recommended childhood vaccinations is a commentary on the failing educational and public health systems in the US. There are families in many countries that beg for access to vaccines, while in the United States, vaccine privilege has created opportunities for malignant misinformation and sometimes willful ignorance.”
― Ashely Alker, MD, 99 Ways to Die: And How to Avoid Them