Quotes About Truth

Asentí con la cabeza. Al fin y al cabo asentir no puede considerarse exactamente una mentira, ¿no?

Istina nas uvek iznenadi.

Nothing ever really changes. Kids still get beaten up by their own parents and allow themselves to be tricked into believing lies." "And then along comes someone like you, who opens his heart to all those people who've been caught by the lie.

I believe the truths of the Bible. I just think that all too often we Christians have a tendency to try to pick and choose what we want to remember so that we can put God into a box of our choosing. He won't fit. God works outside those artificial boxes of human design.

True goal of totalitarian propaganda is not persuasion, but organization of the polity. ... What convinces masses are not facts, and not even invented facts, but only the consistency of the system of which they are presumably part.

Mass propaganda discovered that its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow.

The outstanding negative quality of the totalitarian elite is that it never stops to think about the world as it really is and never compares the lies with reality.

The most striking difference between ancient and modern sophists is that the ancients were satisfied with a passing victory of the argument at the expense of truth, whereas the moderns want a more lasting victory at the expense of reality

Factuality itself depends for its continued existence upon the existence of the nontotalitarian world.

When an old truth ceases to be applicable, it does not become any truer by being stood on its head.

The result of a consistent and total substitution of lies for factual truth is not that the lie will now be accepted as truth and truth be defamed as a lie, but that the sense by which we take our bearings in the real world—and the category of truth versus falsehood is among the mental means to this end—is being destroyed.

what we usually call life is death, what we usually call death is life

The argument that we cannot judge if we were not present and involved ourselves seems to convince everyone everywhere, although it seems obvious that if it were true, neither the administration of justice nor the writing of history would ever be possible.

On the contrary, anyone speaking or writing about concentration camps is still regarded as suspect; and if the speaker has resolutely returned to the world of the living, he himself is often assailed by doubts with regard to his own truthfulness, as though he had mistaken a nightmare for reality.

The outstanding negative quality of the totalitarian elite is that it never stops to think about the world as it really is and never compares the lies with reality. Its most cherished virtue, correspondingly, is loyalty to the Leader, who, like a talisman, assures the ultimate victory of lie and fiction over truth and reality.

Hannah Arendt

si personne ne peut rendre la justice, c'est que tout le monde est coupable.

all facts that did not agree, or were likely to disagree, with the official fiction—data on crop-yields, criminality, true incidences of "counter-revolutionary" activities as distinguished from the later conspiracy fictions—were treated as non-facts.

It has frequently been noticed that the surest long-term result of brainwashing is a peculiar kind of cynicism — an absolute refusal to believe in the truth of anything, no matter how well this truth may be established.

Într-o lume de neînÈ›eles, mereu schimb?toare, masele atinseser? punctul în care puteau crede, în acelaÈ™i timp, orice sau nimic, când ele gândeau c? totul este posibil È™i c? nimic nu e adev?rat. Amestecul era destul de ciudat, întru-cât demonstra sfârÈ™itul iluziei c? naivitatea era o sl?biciune a spiritelor primitive neb?nuitoare, iar cinismul reprezenta viciul unor minÈ›i superioare È™i rafinate.

it is rare to meet people who believe they possess the truth; instead, we are constantly confronted by those who are sure that they are right.

Under normal circumstances the liar is defeated by reality, for which there is no substitute; no matter how large the tissue of falsehood that an experienced liar has to offer, it will never be large enough, even if he enlists the help of computers, to cover the immensity of factuality.

The need of reason is not inspired by the quest for truth but by the quest for meaning. And truth and meaning are not the same.

Hannah Arendt