Quotes About Truth

All truths — even those that had seemed so certain as to be immune to the very possibility of revision — are essentially manufactured. Indeed the very notion of the objectively true is a socially constructed myth. Our knowing minds are not embedded in truth. Rather the entire notion of truth is embedded in our minds, which are themselves the unwitting lackeys of organizational forms of influence.

Paraphrasing Plato's Republic: Only people who have allowed themselves to be reformed by reality have it in themselves to reform their polis for the better.

In fact, it's the very impersonality of impersonal knowledge that renders such knowledge the most ethically potent of all.

I don't only act out of my character; my character reacts to my actions. Each time I why, even if I'm not caught, I become a little bit more of this ugly thing: a liar. Character is always in the making, with each morally valenced action, whether right or wrong, affecting our characters, the people who we are.

Exiting the ideological cave, where all our questions are answered and everyone we know agrees with us, is the hardest and most significant step we can take. But if we don't take that step, then we will leave this life no closer to the truth than when we entered it. And that is exactly what it is to live a life not worth living, even if it proves to be the most pleasant sort of existence.

Conclusions that philosophers first establish by way of torturous reasoning have a way, over time, of leaking into shared knowledge.

From the beginning philosophy sought for The order behind the disorder                Thales sipped cheap wine                And in this did divine: "Why it's nothing at all but pure water!

Is it a true story?" Sorel had asked Fraydel. "S'iz an emesa mysah?" (p. 100)

if they're willing to recognize their patterns and change them. When they're willing to see the truth and alter their beliefs, they can create new opportunities for themselves and their descendants. Until then, they may feel as if they're victims in a world they can't control, trying to make more money but barely getting by.

Your friends have told to you hate the Empire, but you have never witnessed any of it firsthand. You realize, of course, that whichever government is in charge always makes the defeated enemy look like a monster. I will tell you the truth. The Empire had very little political chaos. Every person had opportunities...Everyone had a task to do, and they did it willingly.

billions of women must be out there on this seven-billion-person planet being told that they are not reliable witnesses to their own lives, that the truth is not their property, now or ever.

Still, even now, when a woman says something uncomfortable about male misconduct, she is routinely portrayed as delusional, a malicious conspirator, a pathological liar, a whiner who doesn't recognize it's all in fun, or all of the above.

The attack on truth and language makes the atrocities possible. If you can erase what has happened, silence the witnesses, convince people of the merit of supporting a lie, if you can terrorize people into silence, obedience, lies, if you can make the task of determining what is true so impossible or dangerous they stop trying, you can perpetuate your crimes.

the revolt against brutality begins with a revolt against the language that hides that brutality.

James Baldwin famously wrote, "If I am not what you say I am, then you are not who you think you are.

Measured over too short a span, change becomes imperceptible; people mistake today's peculiarities for eternal verities.

To say that the emperor has no clothes is a nice anti-authoritarian gesture, but to say that everything without exception is going straight to hell is not an alternative vision but only an inverted version of the mainstream's 'everything's fine.

One of the rights that the powerful often assume is the power to dictate reality.

The current President's verbal abuse of language itself - with his slurred, sloshing semi-coherent word salad and his insistence that truth and fact are whatever he wants them to be, even if he wants them to be different from what they were yesterday, no matter what else he's serving, he's always serving meaninglessness.

Don't mistake a lightbulb for the moon, and don't believe that the moon is useless unless we land on it.

I'm not arguing here that women and children don't lie. Men, women, and children lie, but the latter two are not disproportionately prone to doing so, and men—a category that includes used-car salesmen, Baron von Münchhausen, and Richard Nixon—are not possessed of special veracity.

Most of my life, I would have doubted myself and backed down. Having public standing as a writer of history helped me stand my ground, but few women get that boost, and billions of women must be out there on this seven-billion-person planet being told that they are not reliable witnesses to their own lives, that the truth is not their property, now or ever.

Like many very poor people and people from countries in turmoil, Nafissatou Diallo had lived in the margins, where telling the truth to authorities is not always a wise or safe thing to do, so she was portrayed as a liar.

The task of calling things by their true names, of telling the truth to the best of our abilities, of knowing how we got here, of listening particularly to those who have been silenced in the past, of seeing how the myriad stories fit together and break apart, of using any privilege we may have been handed to undo privilege or expand its scope is each of our tasks. It's how we make the world.