Quotes About Truth

A blank space on a form, the missing page, a void, a hole in your knowledge of someone--it's still some real thing . It exists. You don't get to fill it in with whatever you want.

People love to read about sins and errors, but not their own.

That means you're my kid, I explained, and I'm your mother, and nobody can say it isn't so.

No reporter worth his buttons will let the facts intrude on a good story.

she considered a language that could carry nothing but love and simple truth.

The radio is at the root of the evil, their rule is: No silence, ever. When anything happens, the commentator has to speak without a moment's pause for gathering wisdom. Falsehood and inanity are preferable to silence.

It was a true conversation. About whether our ancestors had more important lives than we do. And how they've managed to trick us, if they did not.

The urge to lie is produced by the contradictions in our lives. We are made to declare love for our country, while it tramples our rights and dignity.

when the public nerve is aroused, the most impressive capacity of man is his skill for lying.

Scientists are not like other people, sir. We cannot slam our portals. We have to follow evidence where it leads, even if no one likes that place. Even if it suggests that all we have ever believed might be mistaken.

I'm always looking at the dialectic between the truth we believe exists outside ourselves and the truth we invent for ourselves.

Maggot calmed me down by explaining Bible stories were a category of superhero comic. Not to be confused with real life.

A delicate business, telling the truth. So long as Landis writes a happier falsehood for these men to tell themselves, they can believe in opportunity. They are the nearly rich

With these startling honesties glinting up at us from history's broken mirror, it strikes me that this is worth shouting from the rooftops: We could be wrong this time, again. The enemy may not be exactly what we think. It may be a force that resides in many quarters, including inside our skin, in our very words, the questions we frame, the things we love most, the things we can't live without. Our greatest dread may be our salvation.

Memory is a complicated thing, a relative to truth but not its twin.

The girl was compulsively honest. In earlier years, Willa's every attempt to teach her the artful evasion known as "tact" would get shot down with "Mom, that's lying!" And Tig remained the child who announced when opening gifts at birthday parties, "Thanks, Grandma, I have one of these already and I don't really like it.

Tall and straight I may appear, but I will always be Adah inside. A crooked little person trying to tell the truth. The power is in the balance: we are our injuries, as much as we are our successes.

might call it a great passion. When the true name of what we're dealing with is greed, or lust. We all have the special talent of believing in a falsehood, and believing it devoutly, when we want it to be true.

Of course the scientist's position is subordinate. Our task is to make our fussy natures invisible against the mechanisms of the universe. Truth is not ours to find within, but to search out. We study the known world in order to recognize the remarkable.

I've seen many a small life meet its doom at the end of a beak in our yard, not just beetles and worms but salamanders and wild-eyed frogs. (The "free-range vegetarian hens" testimony on an egg-carton label is perjury, unless someone's trained them with little shock collars.)

and do not for the love of the Lord say you're laying down if you mean lying down.

Iano ordered her back to Ivins to finish her degree in biology. Willa wondered when he would notice Tig was immune to his directives. Tig informed her parents she refused to take out bank loans, with tuition exchange no longer an option, and anyway she'd already learned more than she wanted to know about a ravaged biosphere. The latter was no news to Willa, who'd seen how the girl always took the truth of human selfishness harder than any of her friends, even the history majors.

You can fool history sometimes, but you can't fool the memory of your intimates.

That's a tarantula,' he said. 'You got to watch out for them suckers. They can jump four feet. If they get you, you go crazy. It's a special kind of poison' This I didn't believe. I never could figure out why men thought they could impress a woman by making the world out to be such a big dangerous deal. I mean, we've got to live in the exact same world every damn day of the week, don't we?