Post Truth Quotes

“Before mass leaders seize the power to fit reality to their lies, their propaganda is marked by its extreme contempt for facts as such, for in their opinion fact depends entirely on the power of man who can fabricate it.”
― Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism

“When a thousand people believe some made-up story for a month - that's fake news. When a billion people believe it for a thousand years - that's religion, and we are admonished to call it fake news in oder not to for the feelings of the faithful.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, 21 Lessons for the 21st Century

“The mob believes everything it is told, provided only that it be repeated over and over. Provided too that its passions, hatreds, fears are catered to. Nor need one try to stay within the limits of plausibility: on the contrary, the grosser, the bigger, the cruder the lie, the more readily is it believed and followed. Nor is there any need to avoid contradictions: the mob never notices; needless to pretend to correlate what is said to some with what is said to others: each person or group believes only what he is told, not what anyone else is told; needless to strive for coherence: the mob has no memory; needless to pretend to any truth: the mob is radically incapable of perceiving it: the mob can never comprehend that its own interests are what is at stake.”
― Alexandre Koyré, Réflexions sur le mensonge

“A 'post-truth democracy' [...] would no longer be a democracy.”
― Jürgen Habermas, Between Naturalism and Religion: Philosophical Essays

“When manipulated, personalized information becomes even more convincing, and truth evades objectivity, morphing into a subjective reality for every individual.”
― Roger Spitz, Disrupt With Impact: Achieve Business Success in an Unpredictable World

“A mixture of gullibility and cynicism had been an outstanding characteristic of mob mentality before it became an everyday phenomenon of masses. 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. The mixture in itself was remarkable enough, because it spelled the end of the illusion that gullibility was a weakness of unsuspecting primitive souls and cynicism the vice of superior and refined minds. Mass propaganda 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.”
― Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism

“Expanding the competitions’ “dirty bike” or ‘dirty ball” corruption reveals a mirror of society. If politicians deviate from their honest cause into bribery, if art turns into a battle of greed or consumerism, and truth becomes post-truth, the integrity erodes desperately, values are sacrificed at the altar of vainglory, and the moral compass is in a complete mess.
(“The dirty bike")”
― Erik Pevernagie

“Anything could be true. The so-called laws of Nature were nonsense. The law of gravity was nonsense. 'If I wished,' O'Brien had said, 'I could float off this floor like a soap bubble.' Winston worked it out. 'If he thinks he floats off the floor, and if I simultaneously think I see him do it, then the thing happens.' Suddenly, like a lump of submerged wreckage breaking the surface of water, the thought burst into his mind: 'It doesn't really happen. We imagine it. It is hallucination.' He pushed the thought under instantly. The fallacy was obvious. It presupposed that somewhere or other, outside oneself, there was a 'real' world where 'real' things happened. But how could there be such a world? What knowledge have we of anything, save through our own minds? All happenings are in the mind. Whatever happens in all minds, truly happens.

He had no difficulty in disposing of the fallacy, and he was in no danger of succumbing to it. He realized, nevertheless, that it ought never to have occurred to him. The mind should develop a blind spot whenever a dangerous thought presented itself. The process should be automatic, instinctive. Crimestop, they called it in Newspeak.

He set to work to exercise himself in crimestop. He presented himself with propositions -- 'the Party says the earth is flat', 'the party says that ice is heavier than water' -- and trained himself in not seeing or not understanding the arguments that contradicted them. It was not easy. It needed great powers of reasoning and improvisation. The arithmetical problems raised, for instance, by such a statement as 'two and two make five' were beyond his intellectual grasp. It needed also a sort of athleticism of mind, an ability at one moment to make the most delicate use of logic and at the next to be unconscious of the crudest logical errors. Stupidity was as necessary as intelligence, and as difficult to attain.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“Our inherent cognitive biases make us ripe for manipulation and exploitation by those who have an agenda to push, especially if they can discredit all other sources of information.”
― Lee McIntyre, Post-Truth

“It is true that those of us who have political experience could wrestle for power just as any other politician. But we have no time; we have more important things to do. And there is no doubt that the knowledge we hold to be sacred would be lost in the process. To acquire power, millions of people have to be fed illusions. This too is true: Lenin won over millions of Russian peasants, without whom the Russian Revolution would have been impossible, with a slogan which was at variance with the basic collective tendencies of the Russian party. The slogan was: "Take the land of the large land-owners. It is to be your individual property." And the peasants followed. They would not have offered their allegiance if they had been told in 1917 that this land would one day be collectivized. The truth of this is attested to by the bitter fight for the collectivization of Russian agriculture around 1930. In social life there are degrees of power and degrees of falsity. The more the masses of people adhere to truth, the less power-mongering there will be; the more imbued with irrational illusions the masses of people are, the more widespread and brutal individual power-mongering will be.”
― Wilhelm Reich, The Mass Psychology of Fascism

“Total loyalty is possible only when fidelity is emptied of all concrete content, from which changes of mind might naturally arise.”
― Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism

“What a strange creature man is! He does not believe in God, but he does believe that if the bridge of his nose itches he is surely going to die; he disdains to read the creation of a poet, as clear as day and imbued with harmony and the lofty wisdom of simplicity, yet he pounces eagerly on a book in which some know-all has churned everything up, spun a lot of nonsense, bent and twisted nature inside out. He thinks this book is marvelous and he shouts from the rooftops: 'This is it, these are the true facts of the mysteries of the heart!”
― Nikolai Gogol, Dead Souls

“Primitive man, living in communities of restricted extent, providing for his needs by his own production or by direct co-operation, limiting his spiritual interests to personal experience or to simple tradition, surveys and controls the material of his existence more easily and completely than the man of higher culture. In the latter case life rests upon a thousand presuppositions which the individual can never trace back to their origins, and verify; but which he must accept upon faith and belief. In a much wider degree than people are accustomed to realize, modern civilized life—from the economic system which is constantly becoming more and more a credit-economy, to the pursuit of science, in which the majority of investigators must use countless results obtained by others, and not directly subject to verification—depends upon faith in the honor of others. We rest our most serious decisions upon a complicated system of conceptions, the majority of which presuppose confidence that we have not been deceived. Hence prevarication in modern circumstances becomes something much more devastating, something placing the foundations of life much more in jeopardy, than was earlier the case.”
― Georg Simmel, The Sociology of Secrecy and of Secret Societies

“When the mistakes fall disproportionately on one side, it is no respect for the notion of truth to pretend that everything is even.”
― Lee McIntyre, Post-Truth

“The formal announcement of a new word (post truth) in 2016 has shown the Bible to be true, an incredible unintended consequence. The Scriptures tell us that professing ourselves to be wise we have actually become fools; that the lie by which we live, in turn, lands us in death.”
― Ravi Zacharias

“Plugging words into a browser window isn't research: it's asking questions of programmable machines that themselves cannot actually understand human beings.”
― Tom Nichols, The Death of Expertise: The Campaign Against Established Knowledge and Why It Matters

“As the rhetoric and power structures of old dissolve, from monarchy to capitalism to the space between a vocalized phrase and its indefinable mental inclination, this urge becomes heightened. And eventually, this conflict absorbs and finds its home within that foundation from whence it is borne, and from where its impact will fractal into every other component of power and being; the place where this dysphoria and this exchange occurs, now that we have unloosed the stop from our pressured throats, of the place it occurs, of the place it will be fought, of the place where it matters most- the mind.

Because Mind as we know it and matter itself are no longer so perceptually separate. You are reading these words right now, but how? The voice is no longer an element confined in expression to the physical body.

I press buttons with letters on them, just as my tongue presses the palate of my mouth as my diaphragm rises and I have told you something by the sound of my voice, I tell you something now, and you hear me, as we both engage with a device rooted in external reality- a computer screen, or the fluorescent face of a silicon phone- and you cannot tell me that Mind and this device through which we Know the things and engage with things and express things of the nature which the Mind is crafted by and through- are separate. Tell me you are not already integrated with this device you hold in your hands.

Now this- this nexus- will be the stage where the battles of yore, which were fought upon dirt and in the sand and in lush, wild forests with sticks and spears and gunpowder, will now meet and address each other by name, and where they will wreak change with their fury as war is waged for territory of a different kind. And because of this, congratulations- you will be the stage, you will be the weapon, you will stand in the crossfire of wars that are not your own, as men always have through history and time, and “war” will be a different kind of thing. And, staying true to another law of humankind, like bronze, like iron, like steel, the same things that forge our tools will also craft our weapons.

We don’t need nukes. We have the internet.”
― Alice Minium

“We have the right to our own beliefs but not our own facts’ is a common refrain the potency of which is rendered moot by the fact that inconvenient truths are dexterously circumnavigated by the spirited belief that knowing the truth is less valuable than the prize of a shared fiction.”
― Brian Goedken

“More recently, we’ve reached the lowest common denominator, and populism, politics and media have dispensed with old-fashioned values such as truth, honour and chivalry, to the point of arguing, in an Orwellian way, that “up is down”, “wrong is right”, and “truth is fake news”.”
― H.M. Forester, Secret Friends: The Ramblings of a Madman in Search of a Soul

“Totalitarian propaganda perfects the techniques of mass propaganda, but it neither invents them nor originates their themes. These were prepared for them by fifty years of imperialism and disintegration of the nation-state, when the mob entered the scene of European politics. Like the earlier mob leaders, the spokesmen for totalitarian movements possessed an unerring instinct for anything that ordinary party propaganda or public opinion did not care or dare to touch. Everything hidden, everything passed over in silence, became of major significance, regardless of its own intrinsic importance. The mob really believed that truth was whatever respectable society had hypocritically passed over, or covered up with corruption.”
― Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism

“שוב השתהה והיסס, כמו שקל בדעתו איזו תשובה לתת. כאילו אין בעולם דבר כמו 'עובדות' או 'אמת', ויש כמה תשובות אפשריות לכל שאלה, וצריך לבדוק קודם איזו מהן תתאים ברגע הזה, ולשואל הזה.”
― דויד גרוסמן, The Zigzag Kid

“Instead of speaking of beliefs, one must actually speak of truths, and that these truths were themselves products of the imagination. We are not creating a false idea of things. It is the truth of things that through the centuries has been so oddly constituted. Far from being the most simple realistic experience, truth is the most historical.

There was a time when poets and historians invented royal dynasties all of a piece, complete with the name of each potentate and his genealogy. They were not forgers, nor were they acting in bad faith. They were simply following what was, at the time, the normal way of arriving at the truth.

[...] I do not at all mean to say that the imagination will bring future truths to light and that it should reign; I mean, rather, that truths are already products of the imagination and that the imagination has always governed. It is imagination that rules, not reality, reason, or the ongoing work of the negative.”
― Paul Veyne, Did the Greeks Believe in Their Myths?

“I press buttons with letters on them, just as my tongue presses the palate of my mouth as my diaphragm rises and I have told you something by the sound of my voice, I tell you something now, and you hear me, as we both engage with a device rooted in external reality- a computer screen, or the fluorescent face of a silicon phone- and you cannot tell me that Mind and this device through which we Know the things and engage with things and express things of the nature which the Mind is crafted by and through- are separate. Tell me you are not already integrated with this device you hold in your hands.

Now this- this nexus- will be the stage where the battles of yore, which were fought upon dirt and in the sand and in lush, wild forests with sticks and spears and gunpowder, will now meet and address each other by name, and where they will wreak change with their fury as war is waged for territory of a different kind. And because of this, congratulations- you will be the stage, you will be the weapon, you will stand in the crossfire of wars that are not your own, as men always have through history and time, and “war” will be a different kind of thing. And, staying true to another law of humankind, like bronze, like iron, like steel, the same things that forge our tools will also craft our weapons.”
― Alice Minium

“What do we do in a hot cold war, when perhaps our reality was so detonated that we sense the surreal nature of this timeline, because it is, in fact, entirely different, and what has transpired here to create so absurdly alien a landscape as the alien city-change of atomized clouds, of the ideological equivalent of a nuclear bomb? But the weapon is crafted to meet the kind of warfare, and this decade’s weapon will not strike in one explosion, because mind is not like that, but slow and persistent and with a face we know, a face that is ourselves, and the most terrifying part is that we deeply suspect and not wrongly so and in no way explained by a foreign intent that, it is, in fact, ourselves we see?

And does this opening-tool of a window, this channel and central stage of culture and freedom and self and things that is this internet through which I speak these words, necessarily succumb to one party’s control? Just as body and the things we touch are no longer separate, will self and weapon ever be?”
― Alice Minium

“We have the right to our own beliefs but not our own facts" is a common refrain the potency of which is rendered moot by the fact that inconvenient truths are dexterously circumnavigated by the spirited belief that knowing the truth is less valuable than the prize of a shared fiction.”
― Brian Greenen

“Events specially staged to demonstrate the reality of that which doesn’t exist stand out in the particular detail in which they are described. No one really knows, for example, whether the harvests reported in Stalin’s or Brezhnev’s Russia were ever actually reaped, but the fact that the number of tilled hectares or tons of milled grain was always reported down to the tenth of a percent gave these simulacra the character of hyperreality. [...] In this sense, the ideology was accurate—it was describing itself. And any reality that differed from the ideology simply ceased to exist—it was replaced by hyperreality, which trumpeted its existence by newspaper and loudspeaker and was much more tangible and reliable than anything else. In the Soviet land, “fairy tale became fact,” as in that American paragon of hyperreality, Disneyland, where reality itself is designed as a “land of imagination.”
― Mikhail Epstein, After the Future

“To abandon facts is to abandon freedom.”
― — Timothy Snyder (On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century)

“We have the right to our own beliefs but not our own facts" is a common refrain the potency of which is rendered moot by the fact that inconvenient truths are dexterously circumnavigated by the spirited belief that knowing the truth is less valuable than the prize of a shared fiction.”
― Brian Goedken

“And yes, given our circumstances, in this post-enlightenment era of post-trust, post-truth, post-rationality, post-honour, and post-chivalry; as meaningless non-entities in a disenchanted and mechanistic cosmos, these actions are perfectly understandable. As Henry Corbin tells us, we are engaged in a terrible “battle for the soul of the world”, and it's a battle that we may even lose.”
― H.M. Forester

“Melting Pot: Litani untuk Tantangan Tiga Jurang (Intertekstual — Neo-Sufistik Digitalism)

I
Di tepi, dua jurang saling membelai saling melukai—
satu gelap seperti malam sebelum nama Tuhan disebut,
satu berderak seperti server yang lupa bahwa ia sedang sekarat.
Aku berdiri di antara keduanya,
akar menancap dalam retakan;
akar itu mengirim bisikan ke tulang,
lalu sinyal ke motherboard.

Di sinilah Agustinus menunduk dan Nietzsche tersenyum:
yang satu berdoa agar kesunyian kembali bermakna,
yang lain mengangkat palu untuk memahat makna dari kekosongan.
Sementara Camus mengetuk jarinya pelan pada kaca realitas,
menanyakan: apakah kita memilih untuk terus menanti jawaban,
atau memilih absurditas sebagai lampu penerang jalan?

Aku menolak belas kasihan orang lain;
lebih baik jadi pohon yang berdiri—rentan, bengkok, keras kepala—
atau jadi menara yang menuntun doa seperti gelombang radio.
Gapura? Ya, gapura juga, tempat orang lewat tanpa tahu alamat tinggalnya.
Di tiap gerbang aku melihat rumah ibu: bocor, berderit, rapuh, setia menunggu.
Kerinduan menetes, paket data bocor, hujan yang mengunduh rindu dalam format .wav.

II
Di dalam kabel di bawah tanah,
ada lagu yang tak pernah diindeks:
ritme akar yang seperti mantra, glitch yang bergumam seperti zikir.
Di frekuensi itu, domba-domba trauma berbisik—tidak hening, hanya tergeser:
jeritan yang kita bungkus dengan pekerjaan, selfie, dan janji-janji kecil.
Ada Lecter di kursi bayanganku, berbisik: "Kembalilah ke ladang yang kau tinggalkan, Clarice."
Bukan untuk menghakimi, tapi untuk menunjukkan bahwa luka tak akan mati bila kau tak pulang hari ini.

Kesedihan tidak berwujud satu format; ia multi-protokol:
kadang menjadi bug, kadang menjadi palimpsest doa.
Aku rooted—akarku telah di-root oleh sejarah—tapi aku masih bisa reboot rasa.
Namun reboot tidak membersihkan semua log: beberapa pesan terus menunggu status "read".
Dan lelaki perkasa dalam mimpiku?
Ia terbang, punggungnya kuda ego—sebuah patch tanpa dokumentasi,
meninggalkan jejak yang menjadi gema di sumur-sumur batin.

III
Maka aku merespon dengan sebuah litani yang terprogram rapi:
buka—hapus—simpan—tutup—ulang—(echo)…
Suara itu bukan dengung mesin belaka dan bukan pula doa;
ia adalah bahasa ketiga: posthuman yang masih menaruh tempat untuk sebatang lilin.
Di sini Tuhan jadi kecil—huruf kecil di tengah kode—lilin meleleh yang gagal dirender,
tetapi cahayanya cukup untuk membaca peta luka.

Kita menerima bahwa kebenaran kini adalah bayang-bayang:
ada yang memilih kebenaran yang berulang (post-truth),
ada yang memilih kebenaran yang menengok ke belakang (tradisi),
ada pula yang membangun kebenaran di atas logikanya sendiri (eksistensi).
Puisi ditulis tidak untuk menyelesaikan perdebatan; ia lebih memilih ruang:
sebuah melting pot di mana akar, kabel, doa, dan error menjadi satu jamuan.

Di akhir perjalanan, aku tidak menyuruhmu percaya—
aku hanya mengundangmu pulang:
ke gerbang ibu, ke terminal di bawah tanah, ke api kecil yang tak henti berkedip.
Datanglah dengan domba-dombamu yang belum berhenti menjerit;
biarkan mereka mengajar kita cara bernyanyi lagi—
bukan lagu yang sama, tetapi lagu yang baru, gelap, dan setia.

Di sana, di ambang ketiga jurang yang menantang itu, aku menyalakan sebatang lilin sendirian:
sebuah cahaya yang tak menuntut pencerahan, hanya sedikit terang
yang cukup agar induk akar bisa menemukan anak-anak akar yang kehilangan pijakan, dan agar bug-bug bisa belajar berdoa.

November 2025”
― Titon Rahmawan