Quotes About Truth

Power needs witnesses. Witnesses need to be able to speak freely to an audience. The truth can only follow on from agreed facts. Facts can only be agreed if they can be openly articulated, tested ... and contested. That process of statement and challenge helps something like the truth to emerge. From truth can come progress. In the absence of this daylight, bad things will most certainly happen. The acts of bearing witness and establishing facts can lead to positive reform.

It was the Cheshire Cat who had said to Alice, "I'm not crazy. My reality is just different than yours.

Jesus said the truth will set us free. What he didn't mention was how nothing is quite as elusive as getting to that truth.

Cicero said 'So near is falsehood to truth that a wise man would do well not to trust himself on the narrow edge.'

brought back memories of that night. Truth serum. His captors

All works of nonfiction, or memoir, have to first and foremost be art before they can be true. They have to be artful first before they can be truthful... If you emphasize the truth-telling at the expense of art, nobody is going to be interested in it. And if you sacrifice truth in the name of art, you risk triviality. There's a constant balance between those two.

Our willingness to write truthfully brings the story to life.

But my dear man, reality is only a Rorschach ink-blot, you know.

But at any rate, the point is that God is what nobody admits to being, and everybody really is.

But the attitude of faith is to let go, and become open to truth, whatever it might turn out to be.

Never pretend to a love which you do not actually feel, for love is not ours to command.

To interviewers who lamented that life in the time of plague had become so unreal, I'd reply that no, actually *this* was real. What's unreal is the fantasy we humans have been living: growing on and on, in denial of the obvious.

The menu is not the meal.

A good man often appears gauche simply because he does not take advantage of the myriad mean little chances of making himself look stylish. Preferring truth to form, he is not constantly at work upon the facade of his appearance.

the truth of who we are is innate goodness, and the whole journey is really about removing any obstacle or false belief that keeps us from knowing that

Swallow it down (what a jagged little pill)

Only bad religions depend on mysteries, just as bad governments depend on secret police." A character's response to a discussion about eating from the tree of knowledge.

Her book was filled with centaurs because she had not fully grasped the complexity of actual people, actual horses.

I distrust speech therapy. Words are the language of lies and evasions. Music cannot lie. Music talks to the heart.

From this it does not of course follow that there are no natural or human rights; it only follows that no one could have known that there were. And this at least raises certain questions. But we do not need to be distracted into answering them, for the truth is plain: there are no such rights, and belief in them is one with belief in witches and in unicorns.

We know that there are no self-evident truths.

Augustine's final verdict on the philosophers of Greece and Rome was that, although they had made various mistakes, "nature itself has not permitted them to wander too far from the path of truth" in their judgments about the supreme good (De Civitate Dei 19.1).

Failure, it is thought, is what sells, and what people want to hear and read about. I am not so sure.

But without fallibility there is no art. And without art there is no truth.