To Kill the Truth Trivia Quiz

Answer: Friedrich Nietzsche

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (1844-1900) remains one of the most influential intellectuals of modernity. He attacked religion and believed there were no facts or objective measures as such about what is right or wrong. Rather, he argued people must use their "will to power", i.e. their individual capacity for cultural judgement and identity as autonomous agents. Anyone successful in doing so would become an Übermensch. (This has historically been translated as "superman", though many scholars now believe the term should be left untranslated as the English word fails to convey Nietzsche's meaning).

Such perspectivism of the 19th century contrasts sharply with the empiricism of the 18th century. Here's the full quote from the 2nd President of the USA, in 'The Portable John Adams': "Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passion, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence."

Answer: What is truth?

The passage is from the Gospel of John 18:38. It has been called "Jesting Pilate" after statesman-philosopher Francis Bacon (1561-1626) opened his essay "Of Truth" (1625) with: "What is truth? said jesting Pilate; and would not stay for an answer." In this essay, Bacon argues that people are inherently inclined to lie, possessing "a natural though corrupt love, of the lie itself." It has long been debated whether Pilate meant that truth was irrelevant or that it was hard to ascertain. A common interpretation is that the Governor of Judea found no fault with his prisoner but ducked his responsibilities to appease the mob, and (pusillanimously) fled before he could hear a reply, as Bacon suggests.

In the original Greek of St. John's Gospel, the word translated as "truth" in English or "veritas" in Latin is "altheia", which can mean more specifically "unclosed-ness" or "disclosure". It was a term used in Ancient Greek philosophy and revived by Martin Heidegger (1889-1976). Aldous Huxley used "Jesting Pilate" as the title of his 1926 book about his journeys through several countries.

Answer: Kellyanne Conway

Political consultant and pollster Kellyanne Conway (b. 1967) was Donald Trump's presidential campaign manager in 2016. She served as Senior Counselor to the President from 2017 until her resignation in August 2020.

On the NBC program 'Meet the Press', host Chuck Todd asked Kellyanne Conway about White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer's exaggeration of the size of the crowd at Donald Trump's inauguration as President of the USA. Todd asked Conway why Spicer would "utter a provable falsehood" Conway responded that Spicer was giving "alternative facts". After a great deal of negative response from the press and social media, a Breitbart news article claimed "alternative facts" was a legal term, but no other news outlet could find the term in a legal dictionary. Said director Steven Spielberg at the National Board of Review awards for his film 'The Post' (2017), "We are in a fight and it's a fight not just about alternative facts but it's a fight for the objective truth".

In Germany, "alternative facts" (Alternative Fakten) was declared the Un-Word of the Year (Unwort des Jahres), a dubious honor shared with such pearls as lying press (lügenpresse, a favorite of Hitler's), collateral damage, and ethnic cleansing.

Answer: Stephen Colbert

"Truthiness" in this case means the quality of seeming or being felt to be true, even if not necessarily true. Stephen Colbert, in his faux-pundit persona, used it as "Tonight's Word" on his TV program, "The Colbert Report" in 2005. Colbert described how he arrived at the concept: "Truthiness is a word I pulled right out of my keister".

Yet, the word already existed in the OED and other dictionaries of the English language. In the 19th century, truthiness was a synonym, without irony though with some levity, for "truthfulness"; and "truthy" meant "faithful" or "true". Computer programmers started using "truthy" in the 20th century to mean something else. In Boolean logic, an expression can evaluate to TRUE or FALSE, or more precisely, to 1 or 0, turning a relay or transistor ON or OFF. A "truthy" expression evaluates to 1, and a "falsy" expression evaluates to 0.

Be that as it may, in 2006 'Merriam-Webster Dictionary' named "truthiness" its Word of the Year, as did the American Dialect Society the year before. The 'New Oxford American Dictionary' added the new "truthiness" sense to its entries, and credited Colbert with its origin.

Answer: Franz Liszt

Hungarian musician Liszt Ferencz, better known as Franz Liszt (1811-1886), was an astonishing pianist and prolific composer of the Romantic Era who experimented in radical musical forms. His 'Liebesträum No. 3 (Love's Dream)' is a favorite among pianists wishing to display their virtuosity. He wrote 19 Hungarian rhapsodies between 1846 and 1853, the most played from the 20th century onwards being 'No. 2 in C# Minor' (also featured in Bugs Bunny and Tom & Jerry animated cartoons).

By calling truth a flirt, Liszt compares reality to a coquette who may say what the listener wants to hear, without necessarily lying but without revealing or acknowledging anything objective or absolute, and also without revealing complete information. Gustave Flaubert put it more bluntly: "There is no truth. There is only perception." And Henry Ward Beecher was also suggesting the coyness of truth or reality when he said, "Nobody ever sees truth except in fragments."

Answer: Rudy Giuliani

Rudy Giuliani was mayor of New York City (1994-2001) during the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001 that felled the World Trade Center. He ran for President of the United States unsuccessfully in 2008, but ten years later he became the personal attorney for the man serving as President (not an attorney for the office).

In an interview on 'Meet the Press', Giuliani tried to explain why President Trump should not be interviewed by Special Counsel Robert Mueller as part of the investigation into possible coordination between the Trump campaign and Russia during the 2016 elections. "When you tell me [that Trump] should testify because he's going to tell the truth so he shouldn't worry," he said, "well that's so silly because it's somebody's version of the truth, not the truth." When moderator Chuck Todd responded, "Truth is truth," Giuliani asserted, "Truth isn't truth!"

Answer: Craig Silverman

In 2014, Craig Silverman of Nova Scotia had a blog called "Regret the Error" regarding media accuracy, and he was studying Internet misinformation as a fellow at Columbia University. He encountered "websites that looked like real websites and wrote things in a news style, but everything was 100 percent fake." Silverman's reporting on this phenomenon, which was clustered around domain names registered to Veles, Macedonia, made widespread the concept of "fake news", that is, utterly fabricated stories masquerading as authentic. (This is not to say that there are not examples of fake news in history: the yellow journalism of 1890s American newspapers, anti-Semitic propaganda by the Nazis, etc.).

Fake news stories during the U.S. presidential campaigns became a pox on social media. For example, there was the fake news story that Pope Francis had endorsed Donald Trump in the US presidential race. (The Holy See does not make such endorsements.) Another was the fake news report of a child-slavery ring in the basement of a pizza parlor in Washington, D.C. (The pizzeria not only had no prisoners, it had no basement.) Democratic Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton used the term in a speech in December 2016: "It's now clear that so-called fake news can have real-world consequences...". President-elect Donald Trump perceived this as an aspersion on the legitimacy of his victory. In early January 2017, when CNN reporter Jim Acosta asked Trump a question, the President-elect pointed a finger and said, "You're fake news."

This marked a turning point in the use of the term in two ways. First, Silverman noted in a 2018 interview that the term "fake news" had been co-opted from its original meaning of fabricated news stories and used to dismiss good-faith reporting with that which someone disagrees or simply dislikes. Second, it was being misused as an all-purpose ad-hominem attack, as "fake news" was meant to describe a news story or report, an abstraction or phenomenon, not a person. (In other words, "You are fake news" makes no sense to Silverman; one must say "That report about XYZ is fake news". If a person is standing before you, s/he is real, and not a figment of someone's imagination.)

Answer: The Art of the Deal

Reality-TV star and real-estate developer Donald J. Trump (b. 1946) was elected President of the United States in 2016. Decades earlier, in 'The Art of the Deal' (1987) is this statement: "The final key to the way I promote is bravado. I play to people's fantasies.... I call it truthful hyperbole.

It's an innocent form of exaggeration -- and a very effective form of promotion." Decades later, in the autobiographical book 'Dealing with the Devil: My Mother, Trump, and Me' (2021), Tony Schwartz (b. 1952) expressed regret for ghostwriting 'The Art of the Deal' and crafting a persona that helped his client win the election. Schwartz has written many other books, including 'What Really Matters: Searching for Wisdom in America' (1995) and 'Be Excellent at Anything' (2011).

He also co-wrote Michael Eisner's memoir 'Work in Progress' (1998).

Answer: Winston Churchill

Sir Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill (1874-1865) was Prime Minister of the U.K. during World War II and in the early 1950s, among many other accomplishments. When he won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1953, he wrote his wife Clementine: "It is all settled about the Nobel Prize. £12,100 free of tax. Not so bad."

After the 1906 U.K. general election in which the Liberals won by a landslide, Under-Secretary of the Colonial Office Winston Churchill, speaking in the House of Commons, repeated something he had said during the election. It was suggested to him that the British government was effectively using enslaved Chinese laborers in the Transvaal Crown Colony, occupied by the British following the Boer War in what is now northwestern South Africa, beyond the Vaal River. His response: "The conditions of the Transvaal ordinance...cannot in the opinion of His Majesty's Government be classified as slavery; at least, that word in its full sense could not be applied without a risk of terminological inexactitude."

Not everyone agreed with Churchill's circumlocution. The New York Times had reported in 1904 that many Britons compared the labor arrangements in the Transvaal to those of the U.S. South before the Civil War, though it must be said the Chinese were not chattel slaves but indentured workers, albeit in very restrictive and low-paying contracts. Churchill also once said, "In wartime, truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies."

Answer: "You can't handle the truth!"

In testimony at a trial of two marines accused of murdering a third, Colonel Jessup (Jack Nicholson) gave an angry speech that rationalized selectively breaking the rules (indeed the law) to protect the USA and that asserted that no one who is not doing the "dirty work" of military defense should question it. This quote was parodied in a thousand ways in the 1990s, including in a Burger King commercial ("You can't handle the Rodeo Burger") and on the sitcom 'Seinfeld'. The movie 'A Few Good Men' was an adaptation of a Broadway play that was loosely based on a true story, though the victim in real life was humiliated but not murdered.

"The truth is rarely pure and never simple" was said by Oscar Wilde. "That's the truth, Ruth!" was made popular in a song performed by The Big Bopper (J.P. Richardson) on his album 'Chantilly Lace and the Big Bopper' (1959).