Bullshit Quotes

“I've been accused of vulgarity. I say that's bullshit.”
― Mel Brooks

“My bullshit meter is reading that as 'false'.”
― Charlaine Harris, Dead as a Doornail

“The contemporary proliferation of bullshit also has deeper sources, in various forms of skepticism which deny that we can have any reliable access to an objective reality and which therefore reject the possibility of knowing how things truly are. These "anti-realist" doctrines undermine confidence in the value of disinterested efforts to determine what is true and what is false, and even in the intelligibility of the notion of objective inquiry. One response to this loss of confidence has been a retreat from the discipline required by dedication to the ideal of correctness to a quite different sort of discipline, which is imposed by pursuit of an alternative ideal of sincerity. Rather than seeking primarily to arrive at accurate representations of a common world, the individual turns toward trying to provide honest representations of himself. Convinced that reality has no inherent nature, which he might hope to identify as the truth about things, he devotes himself to being true to his own nature. It is as though he decides that since it makes no sense to try to be true to the facts, he must therefore try instead to be true to himself.

But it is preposterous to imagine that we ourselves are determinate, and hence susceptible both to correct and to incorrect descriptions, while supposing that the ascription of determinacy to anything else has been exposed as a mistake. As conscious beings, we exist only in response to other things, and we cannot know ourselves at all without knowing them. Moreover, there is nothing in theory, and certainly nothing in experience, to support the extraordinary judgment that it is the truth about himself that is the easiest for a person to know. Facts about ourselves are not peculiarly solid and resistant to skeptical dissolution. Our natures are, indeed, elusively insubstantial -- notoriously less stable and less inherent than the natures of other things. And insofar as this is the case, sincerity itself is bullshit.”
― Harry G. Frankfurt, On Bullshit

“Apparently people don't like the truth, but I do like it; I like it because it upsets a lot of people. If you show them enough times that their arguments are bullshit, then maybe just once, one of them will say, 'Oh! Wait a minute - I was wrong.' I live for that happening. Rare, I assure you”
― Lemmy Kilmister

“When the sky’s falling, I take shelter under bullshit.”
― Scott Lynch, The Republic of Thieves

“The trick to this solution is that you’d have to be 100% honest. Meaning not just sincere but almost naked. Worse than naked - more like unarmed. Defenseless. ‘This thing I feel, I can’t name it straight out but it seems important, do you feel it too?’ - this sort of direct question is not for the squeamish. For one thing, it’s perilously close to “Do you like me? Please like me,” which you know quite well that 99% of all interhuman manipulation and bullshit gamesmanship that goes on goes on precisely because the idea of saying this sort of thing straight out is regarded as somehow obsene. In fact one of the very last few interperonal taboos we have is kind of obscenely naked direct interrogation of somebody else. It looks pathetic and desperate. That’s how it’ll look to the reader. And it will have to. There’s no way around it.”
― David Foster Wallace, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men

“People are not who they say but rather who their actions reveal them to be....Be smart about it. Don't fall for the bullshit.”
― Ziad K. Abdelnour, Economic Warfare: Secrets of Wealth Creation in the Age of Welfare Politics

“I think all of us are looking for that which does not admit of bullshit . . . If you tell me you can bench press 450, hell, we'll load up the bar and put you under it. Either you can do it or you can't do it—you can't bullshit. Ultimately, sports are just about as close to what one would call the truth as it is possible to get in this world.”
― Harry Crews, Getting Naked with Harry Crews: Interviews

“When heard someone's boasting,
I could smell shit of bull from afar.”
― Toba Beta, Master of Stupidity

“I hate the moments between
meeting someone and leaving
someone

there’s this brief feeling of trust
before the paranoia that seeps in

once you begin to realize that
they’re just like everyone else
you’ve met before

different person
same bullshit”
― R.H. Sin, Whiskey Words & a Shovel II

“She might not be as strong as everyone she met, or as fast, or even as smart. But she could bullshit with the best of them. Combine that with a license to carry, and a girl could more than get by in this life.”
― Laura Lippman, By a Spider's Thread

“A thorough inspection of someone you believed to be loveable will send you back into your shell if all you saw in their life was all bullshit.”
― Michael Bassey Johnson

“Someone who lies and someone who tells the truth are playing on opposite sides, so to speak, in the same game. Each responds to the facts as he understands them, although the response of the one is guided by the authority of the truth, while the response of the other defies that authority and refuses to meet its demands. The bullshitter ignores these demands altogether. He does not reject the authority of the truth, as the liar does, and oppose himself to it. He pays no attention to it at all. By virtue of this, bullshit is a greater enemy of the truth than lies are.”
― Harry G. Frankfurt, On Bullshit

“On the throne of the world, any delusion can become fact.”
― Gore Vidal, Julian

“Bullshit is the glue that binds us as a nation.”
― George Carlin

“Our natures are, indeed, elusively insubstantial—notoriously less stable and less inherent than the nature of other things. And insofar as this is the case, sincerity itself is bullshit.”
― Harry G. Frankfurt, On Bullshit

“Don’t condemn me to the prison of your bullshit.”
― Steve Maraboli

“Bullshit is as common as lame poetry and more unavoidable than
those armed men who are there to protect you from
Bullshit like this is straight from the lab and god loves you and
the government doesn't want war and it's the best movie since
Repo Man and if i stopped drinking the world might end anyway
and breathanarianism and immortality for anything besides

Bullshit that's as common as murder and jailhouse tattoos selling
bunk drugs in paint chip hotels where a cigarette burn on
the mattress tells you more about death than a splatter movie
festival.”
― Sparrow 13 Laughingwand, Hell Soup: The Collected Writings of

“It's a piece of piss. You know what I do? I just get up and read the paper. Then people ask questions, and I just bullshit. Actively bullshit, as opposed to passively. That's the best bit. Just bullshitting. Piece of utter piss.”
― Neil Gaiman, Fragile Things: Short Fictions and Wonders

“When an honest man speaks, he says only what he believes to be true; and for the liar, it is correspondingly indispensable that he considers his statements to be false. For the bullshitter, however, all these bets are off: he is neither on the side of the true nor on the side of the false. His eye is not on the facts at all, as the eyes of the honest man and of the liar are, except insofar as they may be pertinent to his interest in getting away with what he says. He does not care whether the things he says describe reality correctly. He just picks them out, or makes them up, to suit his purpose.”
― Harry G. Frankfurt, On Bullshit

“I wasn't sure which was worse - to know you were a liar or to believe your own bullshit.”
― Eileen Cook, The Hanging Girl

“Dallas, is it remotely possible for you to carry on a conversation that's not loaded down with manure?”
― Susan Elizabeth Phillips, Fancy Pants

“Life begins when we get tired of our own bullshit. We must all get bloody tired of our own bullshit, in order for our lives to begin.”
― C. JoyBell C.

“Bullshit is unavoidable whenever circumstances require someone to talk without knowing what he is talking about. Thus the production of bullshit is stimulated whenever a person’s obligations or opportunities to speak about some topic exceed his knowledge of the facts that are relevant to that topic. This discrepancy is common in public life, where people are frequently impelled – whether by their own propensities or by the demands of others – to speak extensively about matters of which they are to some degree ignorant. Closely related instances arise from the widespread conviction that it is the responsibility of a citizen in a democracy to have opinions about everything, or at least everything that pertains to the conduct of his country’s affairs.”
― Harry G. Frankfurt, On Bullshit

“I once got lost in a dark woods with no supplies.
Struggling to deal with nature, beasts and storms,
that was time when I lost my arrogance as human.”
― Toba Beta, My Ancestor Was an Ancient Astronaut

“Art suffers the moment other people start paying for it. The more you need the money, the more people will tell you what to do. The less control you will have. The more bullshit you will have to swallow. The less joy it will bring.”
― Hugh MacLeod, Ignore Everybody: and 39 Other Keys to Creativity

“The only way to efficiently battle evil is to copy enough to know how to counter each argument, yet not enough to believe all the bullshit.”
― Will Advise, Nothing is here...

“Everything anyone says when they have an agenda is bullshit, and bullshit isn’t necessarily false, but it’s never really the truth either. So when someone’s bullshitting, you need to pay a little more attention.”
― Caliban Darklock

“Conspiracy theory, like causality, works fantastically well as an explanatory model but only if you use it backwards. The fact that we cannot predict much about tomorrow strongly indicates that most of the explanations we develop about how something happened yesterday have (like history in general) a high bullshit content.”
― Peter J. Carroll, Psybermagick: Advanced Ideas in Chaos Magic

“When we characterize talk as hot air, we mean that what comes out of the speaker’s mouth is only that. It is mere vapor. His speech is empty, without substance or content. His use of language, accordingly, does not contribute to the purpose it purports to serve. No more information is communicated than if the speaker had merely exhaled. There are similarities between hot air and excrement, incidentally, which make hot air seem an especially suitable equivalent for bullshit. Just as hot air is speech that has been emptied of all informative content, so excrement is matter from which everything nutritive has been removed. Excrement may be regarded as the corpse of nourishment, what remains when the vital elements in food have been exhausted. […] In any event, it cannot serve the purposes of sustenance, any more than hot air can serve those of communication.”
― Harry G. Frankfurt, On Bullshit