The Death of Truth Quotes

“As Hannah Arendt wrote in her 1951 book, The Origins of Totalitarianism, “The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.”
― Michiko Kakutani, The Death of Truth: Notes on Falsehood in the Age of Trump

“Assorted theories have been advanced to explain confirmation bias—why people rush to embrace information that supports their beliefs while rejecting information that disputes them: that first impressions are difficult to dislodge, that there’s a primitive instinct to defend one’s turf, that people tend to have emotional rather than intellectual responses to being challenged and are loath to carefully examine evidence.
Group dynamics only exaggerate these tendencies, the author and legal scholar Cass Sunstein observed in his book Going to Extremes: insularity often means limited information input (and usually information that reinforces preexisting views) and a desire for peer approval; and if the group’s leader “does not encourage dissent and is inclined to an identifiable conclusion, it is highly likely that the group as a whole will move toward that conclusion.”
Once the group has been psychologically walled off, Sunstein wrote, “the information and views of those outside the group can be discredited, and hence nothing will disturb the process of polarization as group members continue to talk.” In fact, groups of like-minded people can become breeding grounds for extreme movements. “Terrorists are made, not born,” Sunstein observed, “and terrorist networks often operate in just this way. As a result, they can move otherwise ordinary people to violent acts.”
― Michiko Kakutani, The Death of Truth: Notes on Falsehood in the Age of Trump

“The point of modern propaganda isn’t only to misinform or push an agenda. It is to exhaust your critical thinking, to annihilate truth.”
― Michiko Kakutani, The Death of Truth: Notes on Falsehood in the Age of Trump

“The most appalling racist, sexist, and perversely cruel remarks are served up on social media, often with a wink or a sneer, and when called out, practitioners frequently respond that they were simply joking—much the way that White House aides say Trump is simply joking or misunderstood when he makes offensive remarks. At a November 2016 alt-right conference, the white supremacist Richard Spencer ended his speech, shouting, “Hail Trump! Hail our people! Hail victory!” When asked about the Nazi salutes that greeted his exclamation, Spencer replied that they were “clearly done in a spirit of irony and exuberance.”
― Michiko Kakutani, The Death of Truth: Notes on Falsehood in the Age of Trump

“postmodernist arguments deny an objective reality existing independently from human perception, contending that knowledge is filtered through the prisms of class, race, gender, and other variables. In rejecting the possibility of an objective reality and substituting the notions of perspective and positioning for the idea of truth, postmodernism enshrined the principle of subjectivity.”
― Michiko Kakutani, The Death of Truth: Notes on Falsehood in the Age of Trump

“At the same time, Trump continued his personal assault on the English language. Trump’s incoherence (his twisted syntax, his reversals, his insincerity, his bad faith, and his inflammatory bombast) is both emblematic of the chaos he creates and thrives on as well as an essential instrument in his liar’s tool kit. His interviews, off-teleprompter speeches, and tweets are a startling jumble of insults, exclamations, boasts, digressions, non sequiturs, qualifications, exhortations, and innuendos—a bully’s efforts to intimidate, gaslight, polarize, and scapegoat. Precise words, like facts, mean little to Trump, as interpreters, who struggle to translate his grammatical anarchy, can attest.”
― Michiko Kakutani, The Death of Truth: Notes on Falsehood in the Age of Trump

“Trump’s mendacity is so extreme that news organizations have resorted to assembling lengthy lists of lies he’s told, insults he’s delivered, norms he’s violated, in addition to hiring squads of fact-checkers. And his shamelessness has emboldened politicians around him to lie with even more effrontery than ever. Republicans in Congress, for instance, blatantly lied about the effects their tax bill would have on the deficit and social safety net provisions, just as they lied about how much it would help the middle class, when in fact it was all about giving tax breaks to corporations and the very rich.”
― Michiko Kakutani, The Death of Truth: Notes on Falsehood in the Age of Trump

“More and more, your computer monitor is a kind of one-way mirror, reflecting your own interests while algorithmic observers watch what you click.”
― Michiko Kakutani, The Death of Truth: Notes on Falsehood in the Age of Trump

“Social media would further accelerate the ascendance of what the Columbia Law School professor Tim Wu described as “the preening self” and the urge to “capture the attention of others with the spectacle of one’s self.”
― Michiko Kakutani, The Death of Truth: Notes on Falsehood in the Age of Trump

“Truth is a cornerstone of our democracy. As the former acting attorney general Sally Yates has observed, truth is one of the things that separates us from an autocracy: “We can debate policies and issues, and we should. But those debates must be based on common facts rather than raw appeals to emotion and fear through polarizing rhetoric and fabrications. “Not only is there such a thing as objective truth, failing to tell the truth matters. We can’t control whether our public servants lie to us. But we can control whether we hold them accountable for those lies or whether, in either a state of exhaustion or to protect our own political objectives, we look the other way and normalize an indifference to truth.”
― Michiko Kakutani, The Death of Truth: Notes on Falsehood in the Age of Trump

“Facts need testimony to be remembered and trustworthy witnesses to be established in order to find a secure dwelling place in the domain of human affairs.”
― Michiko Kakutani, The Death of Truth: Notes on Falsehood in the Age of Trump

“Nationalism, tribalism, dislocation, fears of social change, and the hatred of outsiders are on the rise again as people, locked in their partisan silos and filter bubbles, are losing a sense of shared reality and the ability to communicate across social and sectarian lines.”
― Michiko Kakutani, The Death of Truth: Notes on Falsehood in the Age of Trump

“Trump’s ridiculousness, his narcissistic ability to make everything about himself, the outrageousness of his lies, and the profundity of his ignorance can easily distract attention from the more lasting implications of his story: how easily Republicans in Congress enabled him, undermining the whole concept of checks and balances set in place by the founders; how a third of the country passively accepted his assaults on the Constitution; how easily Russian disinformation took root in a culture where the teaching of history and civics had seriously atrophied.”
― Michiko Kakutani, The Death of Truth: Notes on Falsehood in the Age of Trump

“Trump often seems like a one-man set of Aesop-like fables—with easy-to-decipher morals like “those who lie down with dogs will get up with fleas” or “when someone tells you who he is, believe him”—but because he is president of the United States, his actions do not simply end in a tagline moral; rather, they ripple outward like a toxic tsunami, creating havoc in the lives of millions. Once he has left office, the damage he has done to American institutions and the country’s foreign policy will take years to repair. And to the degree that his election was a reflection of larger dynamics in society—from the growing partisanship in politics, to the profusion of fake stories on social media, to our isolation in filter bubbles—his departure from the scene will not restore truth to health and well-being, at least not right away.”
― Michiko Kakutani, The Death of Truth: Notes on Falsehood in the Age of Trump

“In The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt looked at the essential role that propaganda played in gaslighting the populations of Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia, writing that “in an ever-changing, incomprehensible world the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true.”
“Mass propaganda,” she wrote, “discovered that its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow. The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.”
― Michiko Kakutani, The Death of Truth: Notes on Falsehood in the Age of Trump

“The journalist Anne Applebaum identified an entire group of “neo-Bolsheviks”—including Trump, Nigel Farage in Britain, Marine Le Pen in France, Jarosław Kaczyński in Poland, and the Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán—who, like Lenin and Trotsky, started out on the political fringes and rode a wave of populism to prominent positions. In 2017, she wrote that “to an extraordinary degree, they have adopted Lenin’s refusal to compromise, his anti-democratic elevation of some social groups over others and his hateful attacks on his ‘illegitimate’ opponents.”
Many of the more successful neo-Bolsheviks, Applebaum points out, have created their own “alternative media” that specializes in disinformation, hatemongering, and the trolling of adversaries. Lying is both reflexive and a matter of conviction: they believe, she writes, “that ordinary morality does not apply to them….In a rotten world, truth can be sacrificed in the name of ‘the People,’ or as a means of targeting ‘Enemies of the People.’ In the struggle for power, anything is permitted.”
― Michiko Kakutani, The Death of Truth: Notes on Falsehood in the Age of Trump

“I hold it, therefore, certain,” Jefferson went on, “that to open the doors of truth, and to fortify the habit of testing everything by reason, are the most effectual manacles we can rivet on the hands of our successors to prevent their manacling the people with their own consent.”
― Michiko Kakutani, The Death of Truth: Notes on Falsehood in the Age of Trump

“Once he has left office, the damage he has done to American institutions and the country’s foreign policy will take years to repair.”
― Michiko Kakutani, The Death of Truth: Notes on Falsehood in the Age of Trump

“Deconstruction, in fact, is deeply nihilistic, implying that the efforts of journalists and historians—to ascertain the best available truths through the careful gathering and weighing of evidence—are futile.”
― Michiko Kakutani, The Death of Truth: Notes on Falsehood in the Age of Trump

“In the future, we could be exposed to realistic videos of politicians saying things they never said: Baudrillard’s simulacrum come to life. These are Black Mirror–like developments that will complicate our ability to distinguish between the imitation and the real, the fake and the true.”
― Michiko Kakutani, The Death of Truth: Notes on Falsehood in the Age of Trump

“In addition to amplifying polarization, the report concluded, social media tends to undermine trust in institutions and makes it more difficult to have the sorts of fact-based debates and discussions that are essential to democracy.”
― Michiko Kakutani, The Death of Truth: Notes on Falsehood in the Age of Trump

“if they’re going to decide what we get to see and what we don’t get to see, then we need to make sure that they’re not just keyed to relevance but that they also show us things that are uncomfortable or challenging or important, other points of view.”
― Michiko Kakutani, The Death of Truth: Notes on Falsehood in the Age of Trump

“that people in the West had also stopped believing the stories politicians had been telling them for years, and Trump realized that “in the face of that, you could play with reality” and in the process “further undermine and weaken the old forms of power.”
― Michiko Kakutani, The Death of Truth: Notes on Falsehood in the Age of Trump

“I learned long ago, covering the ethnic cleansing and genocide in Bosnia, never to equate victim with aggressor, never to create a false moral or factual equivalence, because then you are an accomplice to the most unspeakable crimes and consequences.”
― Michiko Kakutani, The Death of Truth: Notes on Falsehood in the Age of Trump

“The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.”
― Michiko Kakutani, The Death of Truth: Notes on Falsehood in the Age of Trump

“Because social media sites give us information that tends to confirm our view of the world—what Pariser calls “an endless you-loop”—people live in increasingly narrow content silos and correspondingly smaller walled gardens of thought.”
― Michiko Kakutani, The Death of Truth: Notes on Falsehood in the Age of Trump

“With this embrace of subjectivity came the diminution of objective truth: the celebration of opinion over knowledge, feelings over facts—a development that both reflected and helped foster the rise of Trump.”
― Michiko Kakutani, The Death of Truth: Notes on Falsehood in the Age of Trump

“If citizens do not bother to gain basic literacy in the issues that affect their lives,” Nichols wrote, “they abdicate control over those issues whether they like it or not. And when voters lose control of these important decisions, they risk the hijacking of their democracy by ignorant demagogues, or the more quiet and gradual decay of their democratic institutions into authoritarian technocracy.”
― Michiko Kakutani, The Death of Truth: Notes on Falsehood in the Age of Trump

“In his 2007 book, The Cult of the Amateur, the Silicon Valley entrepreneur Andrew Keen warned that the internet not only had democratized information beyond people’s wildest imaginings but also was replacing genuine knowledge with “the wisdom of the crowd,” dangerously blurring the lines between fact and opinion, informed argument and blustering speculation.”
― Michiko Kakutani, The Death of Truth: Notes on Falsehood in the Age of Trump

“To examine how a disregard for facts, the displacement of reason by emotion, and the corrosion of language are diminishing the very value of truth, and what that means for America and the world.”
― Michiko Kakutani, The Death of Truth: Notes on Falsehood in the Age of Trump