"A man may feel thoroughly ashamed at having told a small falsehood, without blushing," he wrote, "but if he even suspects that he is detected he will instantly blush, especially if detected by one whom he reveres".
What's more, your small falsehood undermines the legitimacy of ordinary parental concern by implying that only families that have suffered personally from gun violence -- an aunt harmed in a bazooka mishap, a cousin injured while being shot out of a cannon -- have the right to worry about such things.
But not one of these small falsehoods or mistakes even starts to challenge the big truth, the truth that Dr Kelly, Gilligan and many others understood.
On a foundation of small, medium-sized, and extra-large falsehoods, "The Obama Nation" erects a superstructure of innuendo, guilt by (often nonexistent) association, baseless speculation, and sinister-sounding but irrelevant digression.
The Southern Poverty Law Centre in Alabama has labelled it a "hate group" because it spreads "known falsehoods" about homosexuality.In small pockets across the South, life is changing for the gay community, partly thanks to the work of grassroots groups like The Centre for Artistic Revolution in Little Rock or the GLBT Advocacy & Youth Services, in Huntsville, Alabama.
Some of the falsehoods in Daisey's monologue are small, such as how many factories he visited and how many workers he spoke to.
As the author, that often means leaving things oblique, because I want the truth, whether big or small, to be questioned, to enter into evidence the idea of falsehood.
"We've got a small population and very large land mass and we are an exporter of energy, so that measurement is a falsehood in a sense because it does not properly reflect exactly what our economy is," Hockey said.
Good literature is life's contradictions writ small.Dueling narratives aside, Mr Almond goes wrong in supposing that the cultural and political influence of deplorable falsehoods would vanish, more or less, if only the reasonable people would agree to ignore the unreasonable people.
That's hypocrisy and falsehood.
