106 Denial Quotes

Middle age is the time when a man is always thinking that in a week or two he will feel as good as ever.

We see time's furrows on another's brow, And death intrench'd, preparing his assault; How few themselves in that just mirror see!

I would like to say we're at a point where global warming is impossible to deny. Let's just say that global warming deniers are now on a par with Holocaust deniers, though one denies the past and the other denies the present and future.

And while blood's the only language that your deaf old ears can hear And still you will not answer with that message coming clear Does it mean there's no more ripples in your tired old glory stream And the buzzards own the carcass of your dream?

Mel Gibson's father doesn't think there was a Holocaust? Great. I don't think there's a movie. We're even.

The truth is that we live out our lives putting off all that can be put off; perhaps we all know deep down that we are immortal and that sooner or later all men will do and know all things.

Like all real heroes, Charley had a fatal flaw. He refused to believe that he had gonorrhea, whereas the truth was that he did.

Yesterday I parked my car in a tow-away zone...when I came back the entire area was missing.

Few of us can easily surrender our belief that society must somehow make sense. The thought that the state has lost its mind and is punishing so many innocent people is intolerable. And so the evidence has to be internally denied.

To most of us nothing is so invisible as an unpleasant truth. Though it is held before our eyes, pushed under our noses, rammed down our throats - we know it not.

'The rock is gonna fall on us,' he stood and told the class The professor put his chalk down and peered out through his glasses But he went on and said; 'I've seen it, high up on the hill If it doesn't fall this year then very soon it will!'

If you wish to attain holy recollection, you will do so not by receiving but by denying.

Ivan Ilych saw that he was dying, and he was in continual despair. In the depth of his heart he knew he was dying, but not only was he not accustomed to the thought, he simply did not and could not grasp it. The syllogism he had learnt from Kiesewetter's Logic: 'Caius is a man, men are mortal, therefore Caius is mortal,' had always seemed to him correct as applied to Caius, but certainly not as applied to himself. That Caius - man in the abstract - was mortal, was perfectly correct, but he was not Caius, not an abstract man, but a creature quite, quite separate from all others.

There are none so blind as those who will not see.

You don't know things anywhere! You live in a dream; you manufacture illusions!

I don't have a drinking problem 'cept when I can't get a drink.

TRUE! - nervous - very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am; but why will you say that I am mad?

I have loved my German people and my fatherland with a warm heart. I have done my duty by the laws of my people and I am sorry this time my people were led by men who were not soldiers and that crimes were committed of which I had no knowledge. Germany, good luck.

Your Englishman, confronted by something abnormal will always pretend that it isn't there. If he can't pretend that, he will look through the object, or round it, or above it or below it, or in any direction except into it. If, however, you force him to look into it, he will at once pretend that he sees the object not for what it is but for something that he would like it to be.

When the wayfarer whistles in the dark, he may be disavowing his timidity, but he does not see any more clearly for doing so.

Sanity can take one of two forms: That of either ignorance, or denial.

My life is in denial, and when I die, baptized in eternal fire I'll shed so many tears

'Hello Rabbit, is that you?' 'Let's pretend it isn't', said Rabbit, 'and see what happens.'

I did not hang Calhoun and shoot Clay.

First silence. Then denial. Then support of the insupportable. Then vilification of the dissenters. The pattern is as old as time.

Ahern has had his speaking style described as 'Bertispeak 'It is not correct, and if I said so, I was not correct -- I cannot recall if I said it, but I did not say, or if I did, I did not mean to say it -- ' [6]

I want to say one thing to the American people. I want you to listen to me. I'm gonna say this again. I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinski. I never told anybody to lie, not a single time, never. These allegations are false, and I need to go back to work for the American people.

Because I beat the Jews in chess. I beat them badly too, I beat them very badly... Plus, on top of that I exposed them as cheating in chess! As outright crooks. Plus, I exposed the holocaust as never happened. Totally made up. The Jews are goddamn liars. There is not a shred of truth to this holocaust.

[R Kelly]'s got a lot of balls. Talking about 'it ain't me'. Got a damn sex tape out; 'it ain't me'. Motherfucker, we know what you look like. That's you, okay? There's a damn Soul Train award right next to the bed.

Let us retrace our steps: I have deceived you: Nothing is here I could not frankly tell you: No hint of guilt, or faithlessness, or threat. Dreams-they are madness. Staring eyes-illusion. Let us return, hear music, and forget . . .

I'm not paranoid. I'm not a dope. I'm not like a lot of these... paranoid dopes.

Laugh if you want to / Or say you don't care / If you cannot see it / You think it's not there / It doesn't work that way.

'I do not know these good men,' replied the prisoner.

Why did I come? I didn't come. I went. I wasn't coming here, to meet these people. I was leaving there. Getting away. Only I tricked myself.

Why do you bother asking, when you know the answer and you also know that you don't intend to believe it?

They're afraid of death! Can you at least imagine what that means? We fear death, too No... You resent death. You regret death. But as for your own life, you know perfectly well that no one can threaten it at all. Death is something that happens to someone else.

I did not have sex with that woman. I wanted to! (Man of the Year, 2006)

Our system is so terrible that nobody in the world will believe it possible... If someone were to succeed to escape from Auschwitz and to tell their story to the entire world, the entire world would consider it unbelievable...

No, I have not supported that, and I don't see my position on that changing.

'I think that is very very bad, for that man to make an accusation like that, that is terrible. I have never, ever since I've managed, ever told a pitcher to throw at anybody, nor will I ever. And if I ever did, I certainly wouldn't make them throw at a fucking .130 hitter like [Joe] Lefebvre...or fucking [Kurt] Bevacqua who couldn't hit water if he fell out of a fucking boat. And I guaran-fucking-tee you this, that when I pitched and I was gonna pitch against a fucking team that had guys on it like Bevacqua, I'd send a fucking limousine to get the cocksucker to make sure he was in the motherfucking lineup because I'd kick that cocksucker's ass any fucking day of the week. He's a fucking motherfucking bigmouth, I'll tell you that.' -- in response to being accused by San Diego Padres manager Dick Williams of throwing at his batters in a 1984 game. [5]

'... I am not, and never have been, a Soviet agent.'

'And now I hear I have a illegitimate child! I don't even know who this woman is!'

We haven't accepted - we can't really believe - that the most characteristic product of our age of scientific miracles is junk, but that is so. And we still think and behave as though we face an unspoiled continent, with thousands of acres of living space for every man. We still sing 'America the Beautiful' as though we had not created in it, by strenuous effort, at great expense, and with dauntless self-praise, an unprecedented ugliness.

I thought you were kidding. I thought it was a joke, I even wrote it down in my diary. 'Veronica had a very funny joke today.' I laughed at it later that night.

He was conscious that something in [his] personality bolstered his confidence and allowed him to rest, to seek peace and find it. He never game a name to it, and never spoke of it. And never, never would he have allowed himself or anyone to call it - love

Utter confusion/ Live on in your illusion/ That won't wear out

If you mention to a woman that the song is disgusting and mysoginistic, they all give you the same answer: 'He ain't talking 'bout me!' Smack her with a dick, smack her with a dick : He said your name! 'No, he didn't!' Smack her with a dick, smack her with a dick :

It's a totally inhospitable place, you shouldn't be here, the sun, you live about three quarters of a mile from it, I've seen insects walking around with kneepads, you fling yourselves into the sea when you're not actually walking around audibly crackling in the heat and the sea is full of things designed exclusively to kill you, sharks, jellyfish, swimming knives, they're all there. But yet you persist in living here. So you know, its a jail, you live in, it's lovely, you've done wonderful things with it, but you're all still in denial

The Prosecution holds me responsible for the concentration camps, for the destruction of Jewish life, for Einsatzgruppen and other things. All of this is neither in accord with the evidence nor with the truth. The accusers as well as the accused are exposed to the dangers of a summary proceeding. It is correct that I had to take over the Reich Security Main Office. There was no guilt in that in itself. Such offices exist in governments of other nations too. However, the task and activity assigned to me in 1943 consisted almost exclusively in the reorganization of the German political and military intelligence service, though not as Heydrich's successor. Almost a year after his death I had to accept this post under orders and as an officer at a time when suspicion fell on Admiral Canaris of having collaborated with the enemy for years. In a short time I ascertained the treason of Canaris and his accomplices to the most frightful extent.

We do not torture.

I have no son named Yakov

...it is a pack of lies... --Michael Berube, June 22, 2006 [232]

The radicals moved their support, in a peculiar way, to the successor of the USSR too, Putin's Russia. The genocidal war of Russia in Chechnya - far worse than the war in Iraq, immeasurably worse than the light conflict between the Israelis and Palestinians - is met with silence. The radicals supported the Russian side - Serbia - in the civil war in Yugoslavia, opposed the American intervention in the war that stopped the genocide, and the radical guru Noam Chomsky even denied that a massacre in Srebrenica took place. When this inconvenient fact was published - not the first or last time that Chomsky loses touch with reality - he initiated a media campaign, that managed to get the Guardian to retract the piece. On the same occasion, the Guardian removed an angry letter of a survivor of a Serbian concentration camp. By the way, the interview with Chomsky revolved around Chomsky's defense of the right of a Holocaust denier to free speech. It turns out that the survivors of the massacre that Chomsky supported have no right to free speech. --Yossi Gurevich, June 2, 2007 [239]

As long as no one said anything, he could pretend that it was love. That she felt about him as he felt about her

She needed his gentle hands and quiet tears, his lies and his affection. And so she pretended to believe that he really did need her

You had no choice No, but you'd be amazed at how often people who have no choice act as if they had one, and lose everything because they could not bear to do what had to be done

Errr I didn't see it.

' one TWOO AAAAAND no.'

Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing ever happened.

I was never an anti-Semite. ... My sensitive nature revolted at the sight of corpses and blood... I personally had nothing to do with this. My job was to observe and report on it.

Yes, I'm very normal, everything is okay, I won't become a psychiatric case.

Optimist, n. A proponent of the doctrine that black is white.

When an official declares something false, chances are that it is. When he or she says it is absolutely false, chances are it is true. ... The overemphasis sticks out like Pinocchio's nose.

Your denial is beneath you, and thanks to the use of hallucinogenic drugs, I see through you.

I heard somebody say that the war ended today, but everybody knows it's going still.

?Que no quiero verla! Dile a la luna que venga, que no quiero ver la sangre de Ignacio sobre la arena. ?Que no quiero verla!

What is art but the denial of life?

People don't like reality, they don't like common sense, until age forces it on them.

A man has only one way of being immortal on earth: he has to forget he is a mortal.

Denial was a weapon; it killed truth, numbed the mind, and I was a junkie.

The last thing in my head was a relationship, a girlfriend, anything. I remember the first few days hanging out with Vanessa; in the front of my brain I'm thinking, No way. A real guy thing, you know? No fucking way, man. But somewhere in the back is the real truth, and you know you're fucked. It was practically like I'd said 'Never' - and boom. You know? Boom. (2003)

I accept responsibility for U-boat warfare from 1933 onward, and of the entire navy from 1943 on, but to make me responsible for what happened to Jews in Germany, or Russian soldiers on the east front - it is so ridiculous all I can do is laugh.

I don't believe this man has any notion of what is going on in the world. He is acute, in no ways dull, but his mind seems to have blocked out the salient features of the trials thus far. He rejects the atrocities, the killing of millions of Jews, the barbarism of the SS, the entire criminal modus operandi of the Nazi Party. He sees only that he was innocent of any crime, past or present, and that any attempt to incriminate him or any of the others on trial with him is political connivery. He feels Germany's actions were the result of oppression after the last war, on the one hand, and on the other takes no cognizance of his own culpability in being a faithful servant to Hitler and his regime. He denies atrocities at sea and is still doubtful about them on land.

I accept responsibility for the camps, but as far as measures against the Jews, I had nothing to do with them. Those orders came from the RSHA. Himmler sent orders to Kaltenbrunner, who transmitted them to Mueller of the Gestapo, and the latter had the entire extermination program under him. That was the way all of Himmler's orders went. I did not participate in the murder of the Jews.

Himmler chose certain camps and, together with Kaltenbrunner and Mueller, ordered the commandants of these camps to carry out the extermination program. This was done in the chain of command as I have just told you. I emphasize that it was Himmler to Kaltenbrunner to Mueller to Gluecks, who was also one of my subordinate generals, to the individual concentration camp commandants, who had been selected by Himmler to perform the exterminations. Otherwise, Himmler would have had to give the orders to me because I was technically in charge of the concentration camps. What I am trying to bring out is that although I am responsible for the camps, and the extermination program took place within these camps, I am not responsible for the extermination program itself, because these orders did not go through me, but went through the chain of individuals I have just mentioned.

Ach! If Hitler had given me an immoral order I would have refused. Think of it! To break teeth out of a dead body! Think of it! Why, if I had been only a simple soldier, I would not have obeyed. I would have said that it was against my religious conviction. That dog Pohl knew all about it.

If the world should blow itself up, the last audible voice would be that of an expert saying it can't be done.

There wasn't any shoot to kill order. That was a fabrication.

Since it is the Other within us who is old, it is natural that the revelation of our age should come to us from outside - from others. We do not accept it willingly.

Eppur si muove