One of the questions that has most bothered me in my reflections on culture is the question of kitsch. Just what is it? When did it begin? And why?
Roger ScrutonRead
Anyone can lie. One need only have the requisite intention - in other words, to say something with the intention to deceive. Faking, by contrast, is an achievement. To fake things you have to take people in, yourself included.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Lying is simple, but faking requires a deeper level of deception and self-awareness.
In this quote, Roger Scruton distinguishes between lying and faking. While anyone can tell a lie with the intent to deceive, faking entails a more complex process where one must not only deceive others but also convince oneself, highlighting the intricacies of authenticity and the nature of self-deception.
Themes
LieFakingDeceptionAuthenticitySelf-Awareness
In practice
Example use cases
In a discussion about honesty in art, one might quote this to emphasize the difference between simple deception and the complexity of artistic authenticity.
More from Roger Scruton
All quotes βThere are big questions science doesn't answer, such as why is there something rather than nothing? There can't be a scientific answer to that because it's the answer that precedes science.
Roger ScrutonRead
18th century opera is packed with emotion, but contains not a trace of kitsch. Only with the 'thees' and 'thous' of Victorian poetry does the disease begin to grow in our poetic tradition.
Roger ScrutonRead
The robust English view used to be that the correct response to offensive words is to ignore them, or to answer them with a rebuke. If you invoke the law at all, it should be to protect the one who gives the offence, and not the one who takes it. Now, it seems, it is all the other way round.
Roger ScrutonRead
For two centuries the English countryside has been an icon of national identity and the loved reminder of our island home. Yet the government is bent on littering the hills with wind turbines and the valleys with high speed railways.
Roger ScrutonRead
You cannot own a symphony or a novel in the way you can own a Damien Hirst. As a result there are far fewer fake symphonies or fake novels than there are fake works of visual art.
Roger ScrutonRead
Similar quotes
Death! Strange that there should be such a word, and such a thing, and we ever forget it; that one should be living, warm and beautiful, full of hopes, desires and wants, one day, and the next be gone, utterly gone, and forever!
Harriet Beecher StoweRead
Let us not forget such words, and all they mean, as hatred, bitterness, and rancor greed, intolerance, bigotry; let us renew our faith and pledge to man, his right to be himself and free.
Edna St. Vincent MillayRead
For nature by the same cause, provided it remain in the same condition, always produces the same effect, so that either coming-to-be or passing-away will always result.
AristotleRead
. . . persist in that invocation until the unity of the world is subsumed for you in a single sphere, so that with the eye of your heart you will see naught in the two worlds save the One.
Ibn Ata AllahRead
Don't you know that a midnight hour comes when everyone has to take off his mask? Do you think life always lets itself be trifled with? Do you think you can sneak off a little before midnight to escape this?
Soren KierkegaardRead
So many things I had thought forgotten Return to my mind with stranger pain: Like letters that arrive addressed to someone Who left the house so many years ago.
Philip LarkinRead