Posted by jim at September 28, 2003 06:26 PMThe shallow cascade of mendacity which attends my refusal of a boring dinner engagement is not the same thing as the un-saying of history and lives in a Stalinist encyclopedia. Gnostic finalities of falsehood are not in common play. But between them these two polarities delimit what is, by all evidence, the larger part of private and social speech.
[George Steiner. 1975. After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation. p. 221]