Quotes About Truth

A year earlier, I had described campaigns to reporters as "like an MRI for the soul—whoever you are, eventually people find out.

Whether I am the candidate for the presidency, or president, or stay in the Senate, I regard our obligation not to please you but to serve you, and in my judgment, in 1960, a candidate for the presidency should be willing to give the truth to the people, and the truth is that what we are now doing is not good enough.

Freedom goes with suffering. Truth, wisdom, and knowledge of reality go with suffering.

All writing is lies. Good writing is lies skillfully told.

documentaries

Half truths were a wonderful way to inspire credibility.

All you have to do [to win a Pulitzer Prize] is spend your life running from one awful place to another, write about every horrible thing you see. The civilized world reads about it, then forgets it, but pats you on the head for doing it and gives you a reward as appreciation for changing nothing.

Pender laughed. "Verify? In this day and age? Who cares about verifying anything? It's all about the speed. Who gets there first defines the truth. You know that as well as any man living.

That the Bible contains more knowledge necessary to man in his present state than any other book in the world.

We tell the stories we have to tell, stories of the things that draw us in-and why should any of us have more than a handful of those? The only work really worth doing-the only work you can do convincingly-is the work that focuses on the things you care about. To not focus on those issues is to deny the constants in your life.

The truth is, I didn't think wind farms were an effective means of alternative energy so I said so. Back then, at the BBC you had to toe the line and I wasn't doing that.

Life's big questions are big in the sense that they are momentuous. However, contrary to appearances, they are not big in the sense of being unanswerable. It is only that the answers are generally unpalatable. There is no great mystery, but there is plenty of horror.

While the optimists have answers to life's big questions, they are not the right ones, or so I shall argue. Their answers are believed, when they are believed, because people so desperately want to believe them, and not because the force of arguments supporting them makes it the case that we must believe them.

Truth might be stranger than fiction, but it needs a better editor.

What's the good news? -Pardon? -You said the bad news is we're going the wrong way. -There isn't any good news. Just because there's bad news doesn't mean there's good news, too.

You couldn't let too much truth seep into your conversation, you couldn't admit with your mouth what your eyes had seen.

Aristotle: "Education is an ornament in prosperity and a refuge in adversity." I had lived in the truth of that for all those years.

The Self is the ultimate authority and our only true support.

I look around at all these teachers, that fed us a narrative that we could be whatever we wanted to be, that we could achieve whatever we dreamed of. That was a load of nonsense. Why didn't they teach us how to cope with heartbreak and disillusionment rather than Pythagoras and the periodic table?

Most of us, no matter what we say, are walking in the dark, whistling in the dark. Nobody knows what is going to happen to him from one moment to the next, or how one will bear it. This is irreducible. And it is true of everybody. Now, it is true that the nature of society is to create, among its citizens, an illusion of safety; but it is also absolutely true that the safety is always necessarily an illusion. Artists are here to disturb the peace.

The purpose of art is to lay bare the questions which have been hidden by the answers.

I have never seen myself as a spokesman. I am a witness. In the church in which I was raised you were supposed to bear witness to the truth. Now, later on, you wonder what in the world the truth is, but you do know what a lie is.

Americans, unhappily, have the most remarkable ability to alchemize all bitter truths into an innocuous but piquant confection and to transform their moral contradictions, or public discussion of such contradictions, into a proud decoration, such as are given for heroism on the battle field.

I can't believe what you say, because I see what you do.