Quotes About Truth

The tethering of words to reality helps allay the worry that language ensnares us in a self-contained web of symbols.

If old truths are to retain their hold on men's minds, they must be restated in the language and concepts of successive generations

Stereotypes based on hostile depictions rather than on firsthand experience are bound to be inaccurate. And some stereotypes are accurate only because of self-fulfilling prophecies.

reason, by itself, is just a means of getting from one true proposition to the next and does not care about the value of those propositions.

A respect for scientific thinking is, adamantly, not the belief that all current scientific hypotheses are true. Most new ones are not.

A good rule of thumb is that any country that has the word "democratic" in its official name, like the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (a.k.a. North Korea) or the German Democratic Republic (a.k.a. East Germany), isn't one.

In the pages that follow, I will show that this bleak assessment of the state of the world is wrong. And not just a little wrong—wrong wrong, flat-earth wrong, couldn't-be-more-wrong.

If p or q is true, and p is false, then q is true." They just wouldn't be part of the word's meaning.

Betteridge's Law of Headlines: Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered with the word no.

As for government euphemism, it is contemptible not because it is a form of mind control but because it is a form of lying.

The cultural anthropologists or literary scholars who avow that the truths of science are merely the narratives of one culture will still have their child's infection treated with antibiotics prescribed by a physician rather than a healing song performed by a shaman.

La gente es aceptada o rechazada en base a sus creencias, luego una función de la mente puede ser sostener creencias que procuren al que las sostiene el mayor número de aliados, protectores y discípulos, más que creencias que sean verdaderas.

The realization is disconcerting because it suggests that in a given disagreement, the other guy might have a point, we may not be as pure as we think, the two sides will come to blows each convinced that it is in the right, and no one will think the better of it because everyone's self-deception is invisible to them. For

The psychologist David Myers has said that the essence of monotheistic belief is: (1) There is a God and (2) it's not me (and it's also not you).6 The secular equivalent is: (1) There is objective truth and (2) I don't know it (and neither do you). The same epistemic humility applies to the rationality that leads to truth. Perfect rationality and objective truth are aspirations that no mortal can ever claim to have attained.

As Francis Crick liked to say, "Any theory that can account for all the facts is wrong, because some of the facts are wrong.

The fact-checking site PolitiFact judged that an astonishing 69 percent of the public statements by Trump they checked were "Mostly False

Deep explanations of the universe, the planet, life, the brain? Unless they use magic, we don't want to believe them!

A white lie is told for the benefit of the hearer. A blue lie is told for the benefit of an in-group... While some of the conspiracy theorists may be genuinely misinformed, most express these beliefs for the purpose of performance rather than truth; they are trying to antagonize liberals and to display solidarity with their blood brothers. The anthropologist John Tooby adds that preposterous beliefs are more effective signals of coalitional loyalty than reasonable ones.

Many intellectuals and critics express a disdain for science as anything but a fix for mundane problems. They write as if the consumption of elite art is the ultimate moral good. Their methodology for seeking the truth consists not in framing hypotheses and citing evidence but in issuing pronouncements that draw on their breadth of erudition

Relativists have a point when they say that we don't just open our eyes and apprehend reality, as if perception were a window through which the soul gazes at the world. The idea that we just see things as they are is called naïve realism, and it was refuted by skeptical philosophers thousands of years ago with the help of a simple phenomenon: visual illusions.

The fact that a hypothesis is politically uncomfortable does not mean that it is false, but it does mean that we should consider the evidence very carefully before concluding that it is true.

Self-deception is an exotic theory, because it makes the paradoxical claim that something called "the self" can be both deceiver and deceived.

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.

Foremost is reason. Reason is nonnegotiable. As soon as you show up to discuss the question of what we should live for (or any other question), as long as you insist that your answers, whatever they are, are reasonable or justified or true and that therefore other people ought to believe them too, then you have committed yourself to reason, and to holding your beliefs accountable to objective standards.