Quotes About Truth

Our safety depends on being able to predict the evolutionary path that viruses and bacteria will take in the coming decades, just as safety in Snow's day depended on the rational application of the scientific method to public-health matters. Superstition, then and now, is not just a threat to the truth. It's also a threat to national security.

Benjamin Franklin, who knew a few things about innovation himself, said it best: "Perhaps the history of the errors of mankind, all things considered, is more valuable and interesting than that of their discoveries. Truth is uniform and narrow; it constantly exists, and does not seem to require so much an active energy, as a passive aptitude of soul in order to encounter it. But error is endlessly diversified.

The error is needed to set off the truth, much as a dark background is required for exhibiting the brightness of a picture.

Being correct is like the phase-lock states of the human brain, all the neurons firing in perfect synchrony. We need the phase-lock state for the same reason we need truth: a world of complete error and chaos would be unmanageable, on a social and a neurochemical level. (Not to mention genetic.) But leaving some room for generative error is important, too. Innovative environments thrive on useful mistakes, and suffer when the demands of quality control overwhelm them.

Lion was the one who pointed out that naming hotels after Millennial values -- the Truth, the Purpose, the Community -- now that his generation had reached the age where the luxury of billboard ethics had been derailed by the verities of life, might be lucrative. Aspirational nostalgia, he dubbed it.

All no means is they don't know for sure or there's a secret being kept, like someone's trying to hide something really good.

Or perhaps the truth was that there is no Fate, no pattern, nothing at all except a tired man looking back and forgetting everything but this and that detail which the very act of memory composes into a fate. Eschenburg, remembering his childhood, wondered whether Fate was merely a form of forgetfulness.

Plato said that we are trapped inside a cave and know the world only through the shadows it casts on the wall. The skull is our cave, and mental representations are the shadows.

Disagreement is necessary in deliberations among mortals. As the saying goes, the more we disagree, the more chance there is that at least one of us is right.

Semantics is about the relation of words to thoughts, but it also about the relation of words to other human concerns. Semantics is about the relation of words to reality—the way that speakers commit themselves to a shared understanding of the truth, and the way their thoughts are anchored to things and situations in the world.

Much can be gained be contrasting a theory with its alternatives, even ones that look too extreme to be true. You can really understand something when you know what it is not.

Our visual systems can play tricks on us, and that is enough to prove they are gadgets, not pipelines to the truth.

A...reason we are so-so scientists is that our brains were shaped for fitness, not for truth. Sometimes truth is adaptive, but sometimes it is not.

Anyone can say that rocks fall down rather than up, but only a person who is truly committed to the brethren has a reason to say that God is three persons but also one person, or that the Democratic Party ran a child sex ring out of a Washington pizzeria.

We should expose whatever ends are harmful and whatever ideas are false, and not confuse the two.

Keep in mind a bit of wisdom from the linguist Ann Farmer: 'It isn't about being right. It's about getting it right.

O auto-engano é talvez o mais cruel de todos os motivos, pois faz com que nos julguemos corretos quando estamos errados e nos encoraja a lutar quando deveríamos nos render. Nos desenhos animados e filmes, os vilões são degenerados que enrolam os bigodes e dão gargalhadas de júbilo pela própria maldade. Na vida real, os vilões estão convencidos de sua integridade.

Remember your math: an anecdote is not a trend. Remember your history: the fact that something is bad today doesn't mean it was better in the past. Remember your philosophy: one cannot reason that there's no such thing as reason, or that something is true or good because God said it is. And remember your psychology: much of what we know isn't so, especially when our comrades know it too.

Fashionable academic movements like postmodernism and critical theory (not to be confused with critical thinking) hold that reason, truth, and objectivity are social constructions that justify the privilege of dominant groups.

Reality is a powerful selection pressure. A hominid that soothed itself by believing that a lion was a turtle or that eating sand would nourish its body would be outreproduced by its reality-based rivals.

James Payne notes a perverse sign of progress. Today's Holocaust deniers at least feel compelled to deny that the Holocaust took place. In earlier centuries the perpetrators of genocide and their sympathizers boasted about it.

The culture of science is based on the opposite belief. Its signature practices, including open debate, peer review, and double-blind methods, are designed to circumvent the sins to which scientists, being human, are vulnerable. As Richard Feynman put it, the first principle of science is "that you must not fool yourself—and you are the easiest person to fool.

To make decisions "rationally," by some set of rules, means to base the decisions on some grounds of truth:

Tell people there's an invisible man in the sky who created the universe, and the vast majority will believe you. Tell them the paint is wet, and they have to touch it to be sure. —George Carlin