Quotes About Truth

May fiddled with her phone, reminding herself she was good at this and in control and that getting the story was more important than feminist principles – or no, not even that, it was that feminist principles demanded she tell the truth about this heinous act of violence against a woman and the blokey, misogynist community in which it happened, and if that required flirting with one or more of said blokey, misogynist community members then that was for the greater good.

The English people must miss a thousand minutiae that continental bureaucracies know even too well; but if they see a cardinal truth which those bureaucracies miss, that cardinal truth may greatly help the world.

A great deal of the reticence of diplomacy had, I think history shows, much better be spoken out.

The least veracious man will tell truly the color of his coat, the hour of his dinner, the materials of his shoes.

The newspapers only repeat the side their purchasers like: the favourable arguments are set out, elaborated, illustrated; the adverse arguments maimed, misstated, confused.

The most palpable facts, are exactly the contrary to what we should expect.

A statesman ought to show his own nature, and talk in a palpable way what is to him important truth. And so he will both guide and benefit the nation. But if, especially at a time when great ignorance has an unusual power in public affairs, he chooses to accept and reiterate the decisions of that ignorance, he is only the hireling of the nation, and does little save hurt it.

The facts will be known to our children's children, though not to us.

The soul "itself by itself," could tell all it wanted if it would be true to its sublimer isolation.

The world knows what you seem; it does not know what you are.

You can kill me but you cannot disguise the truth.

Everyone has a story, what's yours?

When you're writing, let's say, an essay for a magazine, you try to tell the truth at every moment. You do your best to quote people accurately and get everything right. Writing a novel is a break from that: freedom. When you're writing a novel, you are in charge; you can beef things up.

I'm a pretty autobiographical writer. I like a high ratio of true events to made-up events or rearranged events. I've always felt that if you think you can find a way to tell the truth and keep the fictional flux going, it's at least a good idea to try, because very often the truth is more interesting than the posed picture, the tableau. The messiness of truth is a useful corrective.

We exhort the compromisers to open their hearts to truth, to free themselves of their wretched and blind circumspection, of their intellectual arrogance, and of the servile fear which dries up their souls and paralyzes their movements.

Truth and justice, on the contrary, are the least universal, the youngest features in the development of human society.

The human mind, then, one might have supposed, was at last about to deliver itself from all the divine obsessions. Not at all. The divine falsehood upon which humanity had been feeding for eighteen centuries (speaking of Christianity only) was once more to show itself more powerful than human truth.

As a lawyer, I was paid to write persuasively. I was paid to take the same set of facts the other side had and make you believe that my version of it was true, while the other side was doing the exact same thing.

Human beings are infinitely fallible, completely unreliable. Science is not. Science is absolute. Under strict principles, if you do A and B, then C will occur. This rarely happens if you inject the inefficiences of humanity into the process.

You made up the truth and then buried the real thing under so much garbage that people grew weary of trying to dig through it and instead just accepted what you offered. It was the easy way out and humans were programmed to always go that way.

Thanks for being honest about your dishonesty.

I like to verify things independently. It's not like any of us are infallible.

Assumptions are dangerous things. I like facts a lot better.

I think you've got to be truthful about the life you have. Otherwise, there's no possibility of achieving the life you want.