Obfuscation Quotes

“You can cite a hundred references to show that the biblical God is a bloodthirsty tyrant, but if they can dig up two or three verses that say 'God is love,' they will claim that you are taking things out of context!”
― Dan Barker, Losing Faith in Faith: From Preacher to Atheist

“Yes, overcomplexity can be used to obfuscate,
but oversimplicity makes it impossible to find commonalities,
shared points of entry, experiences,
values, meaning.”
― Shellen Lubin

“But no. That was analogy rather than homology. What in the humanities they would call a heroic simile, if he understood the term, or a metaphor, or some other kind of literary analogy. And analogies were mostly meaningless — a matter of phenotype rather than genotype (to use another analogy). Most, of poetry and literature, really all the humanities, not to mention the social sciences, were phenotypic as far as Sax could tell. They added up to a huge compendium of meaningless analogies, which did not help to explain things, but only distorted perception of them. A kind of continuous conceptual drunkenness, one might say. Sax himself much preferred exactitude and explanatory power, and why not? If it was 200 Kelvin outside why not say so, rather than talk about witches’ tits and the like, hauling the whole great baggage of the ignorant past along to obscure every encounter with sensory reality? It was absurd.”
― Kim Stanley Robinson, Green Mars

“Any fool can tell a lie, and any fool can believe it; but the right method is to tell the truth in such a way that the intelligent reader is seduced into telling the lie for himself.”
― Dorothy L. Sayers

“Little hypocrisies are easy enough to find, and where sex is involved, one finds little else. During a debate in 1970 over whether to introduce coed dorms at the University of Kansas, one male student said that such living arrangements would leave students “free to engage one another as human beings.” “I believe that the segregation of the sexes is unnatural,” another said. “This tradition of segregation is discriminatory and promotes inequality of mankind.” The same high-flown statements were heard at every school where coeducation was introduced, and they all carried the same tacit addendum: any benefit to our sex lives will be purely coincidental. From the moment the Pill became widely available, the effect of the sexual revolution has mainly been to make women more sexually available to men. This hardly even qualifies as an unintended consequence, just an unannounced one.”
― Helen Andrews, Boomers: The Men and Women Who Promised Freedom and Delivered Disaster

“The fact-finding mission was now the traditional Washington substitute for policy.”
― Barbara W. Tuchman, The March Of Folly: From Troy To Vietnam

“...everything is always muddled, everything is always unclear, inextricable, and perhaps never more so than at the moment when you think you're behaving with the most algorithmic lucidity...”
― Nathalie Léger, The White Dress

“Some of those watching believed answers like this (eg. "I don't recall", "I don't think so.") - which dominated Pell's evidence as well as [former Auxiliary Bishop of Brisbane Brian] Finnigan's and many of the other priests - to be a form of 'mental reservation' or mentalis restrictio in the Latin. It's a theological strategy dating back centuries, which involves the idea of truths 'expressed partly in speech and partly in the mind'. As the theory goes, lying is considered a sin. But a Christian's ethical duty is to tell truth to God - reserving or restricting part of that truth from human ears is ethically sound if it serves the greater good. (p.185)”
― Louise Milligan, Cardinal: The Rise and Fall of George Pell

“- I do have some faith in democracy, but I don't think that this vote can be regarded as a matter of course as democratic. The voters knew too little about the alternatives.
- They are always Ill-informed.
- You are possibly right, but democracy does depend on certain principles of freedom and these are often more essential than demonstrations of freedom. That vote was a demonstration of freedom, but it went against the principles of freedom.”
― Sven Holm, Termush