Is it true that Robert Sheckley wrote a quote about information warfare?

The science fiction writer is often credited with the phrase “The most offensive thing is that in an information war, the one who tells the truth always loses: he is limited by the truth, a liar can say anything.” We have verified the correctness of this attribution.

The quote from the American author can be found, in particular, on sites with collections of aphorisms, including City.net, Socratify.net, "Great words" And "Pearls of Thought". This attribution is also popular in social networks - mentions of the phrase can be found in "VKontakte", Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and on other platforms. At one time, Sheckley’s phrase allegedly appeared on the personal pages of the editor-in-chief of Ekho Moskvy. Alexey Venediktov and blogger Ilya Varlamov.

When trying to find this quote in English, search results will be limited, and the phrase is found in very specific sources. So, in mid-2021 it brought one of the users of the Woo The People forum, and in 2019 on the site with a collection of quotes World Quotes posted Mediabest user. On much more popular similar English-language resources (however, not absolutely reliable) like BrainyQuote or QuoteFancy this quote from Sheckley is missing, as well as in "Wikiquote" and works of science fiction.

It is also noteworthy how differently the statements in the two sources are formulated. For example, user Woo The People gives this option: “In the information war, the one who speaks the truth, will always lose to the liar because the truth teller is limited to the truth & the liar has no such boundaries.” At the same time, on World Quotes the wording is different: “The most insulting that in information war is always the loser is the one who is telling the truth.” It is bounded by the truth, and the liar can bear anything” - it contains grammatical errors, possibly resulting from a literal translation from Russian. In any case, it is extremely suspicious that the supposedly owned deceased In 2005, Sheckley's phrase does not have any canonical formulation.

It is significant that several English-language sources in which the quotation is given are associated with Russia. In 2017, the statement mentioned at the international conference “Russia and Europe: current problems of modern international journalism” in Budapest, editor of the Swiss Russian-language publication “All Switzerland in the Palm of Your Hand”. This conference organized magazine "International Affairs", established Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation. A conference participant then gave the following formulation: “The saddest fact is that, in an information war, the one who tells the truth loses.” “He is limited by the truth, while the liar can proclaim whatever he wishes.”

The quotation can also be found in earlier editions. At the end of May 2014, the Moscow Conference on International Security, organized by the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation, took place in Moscow. During his speech, a quote brought Colonel General Nikolai Bordyuzha, who then held the post of Secretary General of the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO). The wording he used, recorded in the English-language collection of conference materials, coincides with that given at the above-mentioned 2017 conference.

Apparently, Sheckley's quote appeared just a few weeks before the conference organized by the Ministry of Defense. The earliest mention of it on the Internet that we were able to find is publication in LiveJournal dated March 9, 2014 (according to data search engine on this platform, the post was published shortly after midnight, already on the 10th). The author under the nickname no_pasaran concludes the post “About Myself” with an alleged statement from Sheckley. We cannot claim that the quote was used in the original post and was not added later by the author. Another possible source is comment blogger fmidova on the same platform, left for one of the posts on March 12 and not containing any mention of Sheckley. Be that as it may, it was from March 13 that the quote became sharply popular not only in LiveJournal, but also on social networks - at the same time it appeared, in particular, on Alexey Venediktov’s Twitter and Ilya Varlamov’s group on VKontakte. We were unable to establish why the words about the information war were decided to be associated specifically with Sheckley.

Thus, with a fairly high degree of confidence, we can say that the quote from the writer Robert Sheckley was invented in the Russian-language segment of the Internet in the spring of 2014. The statement not only does not appear in the texts of science fiction writers, but is also practically unknown in the English-speaking environment. In turn, the versions of the quote found in Sheckley’s native English differ significantly from each other, are found in single sources and are often used by Russian-speaking speakers.

Update February 28, 2022: We contacted a LiveJournal user who writes under the nickname fmidova. She could not remember where she first saw this quote, but she is sure that its author was Robert Sheckley.

Incorrect quote attribution

What do our verdicts mean?

Read on the topic:

1. Did George Orwell say, “In times of universal lies, telling the truth is extremism”?
2. Did Bismarck say: “If you want to fool the world, tell it the truth”?
3. Did Bismarck say: “They never lie so much as during the war, after the hunt and before the elections”?