Quotes About Honesty

If it can be destroyed by the truth, it deserves to be destroyed by the truth.

Better the hard truth, I say, than the comforting fantasy.

better the hard truth, I say, than the comforting fantasy. And in the final tolling it often turns out that the facts are more comforting than the fantasy.

What if, despite all our pretense and disguise, it was necessary to appear in public with the person we loved most of all? Imagine this a prerequisite for social discourse on Earth.

In good speaking, should not the mind of the speaker know the truth of the matter about which he is to speak?

If a marker were to be erected today, it might read, in homage to his scientific courage: "He preferred the hard truth to his dearest illusions.

Edmund Way Teale in his 1950 book Circle of the Seasons understood the dilemma better: It is morally as bad not to care whether a thing is true or not, so long as it makes you feel good, as it is not to care how you got your money as long as you have got it.

Both science and democracy encourage unconventional opinions and vigorous debate. Both demand adequate reason, coherent argument, rigorous standards of evidence and honesty. Science is a way to call the bluff of those who only pretend to knowledge. It is a bulwark against mysticism, against superstition, against religion misapplied to where it has no business being.

Tom Paine wrote in The Age of Reason: Infidelity does not consist in believing, or in disbelieving; it consists in professing to believe what one does not believe. It is impossible to calculate the moral mischief, if I may so express it, that mental lying has produced in society. When man has so far corrupted and prostituted the chastity of his mind, as to subscribe his professional belief to things he does not believe, he has prepared himself for the commission of every other crime.

there would be one more acknowledged instance of the American public being misled or lied to in the interest of national security.

Imagine a society in which every speech in the Congressional Record, every television commercial, every sermon had an accompanying error bar or its equivalent.

And therefore I would say that the first thing to do is to realize that governments, all governments, at least on occasion, lie. And some of them do it all the time - some of them do it only every second statement - but, by and large, governments distort the facts in order to remain in office.

Better by far to embrace the hard truth than a reassuring fable

We can judge our progress by the courage of our questions and our willingness to embrace what's true rather than what feels good.

In some ways I'm no better than the others, in some ways I'm worse because I'm less alive. Maybe it's being alive that makes them lie, and being almost not alive makes me sort of accidentally truthful - I don't know but - anyway - we've been friends... - And being friends is telling each other the truth...

I'm not going to be hypocritical, I'm going to be honestly critical

This disgust with mendacity is disgust with yourself.

In this way, I destroyed him, by telling him truth that he and his world which he was born and raised in, yours and his world, had told him could not be told?

Honey, you're not operating on the realistic level anymore than I am.

Quite simply, if God knows me better than I know myself, what point is there [in] pretending I am other than I am before God? Prayer is not the place for pretended piety; prayer is the place for getting down to brass tacks. . . . Thus we might as well acknowledge our true state when we pray. We pray to God from where we are, not from where we consider we should be. And God, who knows us where we are, can lead us to where we can be.17

It's pretty simple, the ethical life. It's just demanding.

There's only the integrity of doing and having done.

Daca un barbat refuza sa creada o femeie pe care pretinde ca o iubeste, atunci, spune-mi, barbate, care dintre ei este cel necredincios?

Either you believed in something or you didn't—you couldn't have it both ways and be honest with yourself.