To suppose that "I know" is a descriptive phrase, is only one example of the descriptive fallacy, so common in philosophy. Even if... some language is now purely descriptive, language was not in origin so, and much of it is still not so. utterance of obvious ritual phrases, in the appropriate circumstances, is not describing the action we are doing, but doing it ("I do"): in other cases it functions, like tone and expression, or again like punctuation and mood, as an intimation that we are employing language in a special way ("I warn," "I ask," "I define"). Such phrases cannot, strictly, be lies, though they can "imply" lies, as "I promise" implies that I fully intend, which may be true.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Words like "freedom," "justice," "democracy" are not common concepts; on the contrary, they are rare. People are not born knowing ...what these are. It takes enormous and, above all, individual effort to arrive at the respect for other people that these words imply.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The "sayings" of a community, its proverbs, are its characteristic comment upon life; they imply its history, suggest its attitude... toward the world and its way of accepting life. Such an idiom makes the finest language any writer can have; and he can never get it with a notebook. He himself must be able to think and feel in that speech--it is a gift from heart to heart.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Were you to converse with a king, you ought to be as easy and unembarrassed as with your own valet-de chambre; but yet every look,... word, and action should imply the utmost respect.... You must wait till you are spoken to; you must receive, not give, the subject of conversation, and you must even take care that the given subject of such conversation do not lead you into any impropriety.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is important to realize that determinism does not imply events occur in spite of our actions. Some events occur because we dete...rmine them. Determinism must not be confused with the doctrine of fatalism, which asserts that future events are entirely beyond our control. "It is all written in the stars," declares the fatalist. "What will be will be." The soldier who behaves recklessly on the battlefield in the face of a hail of bullets while thinking "if my number is on it, no precaution will avert death" is a fatalist. Some Oriental religions contain fatalist overtones, and many people are inclined to lapse into fatalism from time to time, especially as far as major world affairs are concerned.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There is no society known where a more or less developed criminality is not found under different forms. No people exists whose mo...rality is not daily infringed upon. We must therefore call crime necessary and declare that it cannot be non-existent, that the fundamental conditions of social organization, as they are understood, logically imply it.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I prefer to make no new declarations [on southern policy beyond what was in the Letter of Acceptance]. But you may say, if you dee...m it advisable, that you know that I will stand by the friendly and encouraging words of that Letter, and by all that they imply. You cannot express that too strongly.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The brotherhood of men does not imply their equality. Families have their fools and their men of genius, their black sheep and the...ir saints, their worldly successes and their worldly failures. A man should treat his brothers lovingly and with justice, according to the deserts of each. But the deserts of every brother are not the same.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The master propagandist, like the advertising expert, avoids obvious emotional appeals and strives for a tone that is consistent w...ith the prosaic quality of modern life--a dry, bland matter-of-factness. Nor does the propagandist circulate "intentionally biased" information. He knows that partial truths serve as more effective instruments of deception than lies. Then he tries to impress the public with statistics of economic growth that ne glect to give the base year from which the growth is calculated, with accurate but meaningless facts about the standard of living--with raw and uninterpreted data, in other words, from which the audience is invited to draw the inescapable conclusion that things are getting better and the present regime therefore deserves the people's confidence.... By using accurate details to imply a misleading picture of the whole, the artful propagandist, it has been said, makes truth the principal form of falsehood.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I do not mean to imply that the good old days were perfect. But the institutions and structure--the web--of society needed reform,... not demolition. To have cut the institutional and community strands without replacing them with new ones proved to be a form of abuse to one generation and to the next. For so many Americans, the tragedy was not in dreaming that life could be better; the tragedy was that the dreaming ended.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »