Quotes About Truth

You heard of honest Socrates, The man who never lied: They weren't so grateful as you think. Instead the rulers fixed to have him tried And handed him the poisoned drink. How honest was the people's noble son! The world however didn't wait But soon observed what followed on. It's honesty that brought him to that state. How fortunate the man with none!

La verità riesce ad imporsi solo nella misura in cui noi la imponiamo; la vittoria della ragione non può essere che la vittoria di coloro che ragionano.

When the Regime commanded the unlawful books to be burned, teams of dull oxen hauled huge cartloads to the bonfires. Then a banished writer, one of the best, scanning the list of excommunicated texts, became enraged: he'd been excluded! He rushed to his desk, full of contemptuous wrath, to write fierce letters to the morons in power — Burn me! he wrote with his blazing pen — Haven't I always reported the truth? Now here you are, treating me like a liar! Burn me!

La verità è figlia del tempo e non dell'autorità.

E la somma degli angoli di un triangolo non può variare a seconda degli interessi della Curia

Who fights for Communism must be able to fight and not to fight, to speak the truth and not to speak the truth, to perform services and not to perform services, to keep promises and not to keep promises, to go into danger and to keep out of danger, to be recognizable and not to be recognizable. Who fights for Communism has only one of all the virtues: that he fights for Communism.

La science ne connaît qu'une loi : la contribution scientifique. (Scène 14, Andrea, La Vie de Galilée, Bertolt Brecht )

Nowadays, anyone who wishes to combat lies and ignorance and to write the truth must overcome at least five difficulties. He must have the courage to write the truth when truth is everywhere opposed; the keenness to recognize it, although it is everywhere concealed; the skill to manipulate it as a weapon; the judgment to select those in whose hands it will be effective; and the running to spread the truth among such persons.

When something seems 'the most obvious thing in the world' it means that any attempt to understand the world has been given up.

Some know full well what Bernard Shaw had in mind when he wrote that "All great truths begin as blasphemies." Rather

Power changes its appearance but not its reality.

Even when the experts all agree, they may well be mistaken.

Those who forget good and evil and seek only to know the facts are more likely to achieve good than those who view the world through the distorting medium of their own desires.

Although this may seem a paradox, all exact science is dominated by the idea of approximation. When a man tells you that he knows the exact truth about anything, you are safe in inferring that he is an inexact man.

Mathematics, rightly viewed, posses not only truth, but supreme beauty - a beauty cold and austere, like that of sculpture.

No matter how eloquently a dog may bark, he cannot tell you that his parents were poor, but honest.

I would never die for my beliefs because I might be wrong.

What we remember is probably fiction anyway.

Sun-worship and pure forms of nature-worship were, in their day, noble religions, highly allegorical but full of profound truth and knowledge.

If, therefore, Atheism is true, all controversy about miracles is useless. They are simply impossible, and to inquire whether an impossible event has happened is absurd.

Morality never faileth; but, whether there be dogmas, they shall fail; whether there be creeds, they shall cease; whether there be churches, they shall crumble away; but morality shall abide for evermore and endure as long as the endless circle of Nature revolves around the Eternal Throne.

Belief in hell stifles all inquiry into truth by setting a premium on one form of belief, and by forbidding another under frightful penalties.

Hitherto the supernatural has always been the makeweight of human ignorance; is it, in truth, this and nothing else?

The warmest feelings of Christendom cluster round the Crucifix, and he, the crucified one, is adored with passionate devotion, not as martyr for truth, not as witness for God, not as faithful to death, but as the substitute for his worshippers, as he who bears in their stead the wrath of God, and the punishment due to sin.