Quotes About Truth

Meanwhile, back in the torture room, the cardinal is now being forced to bleed into a chalice and consecrate his own blood, not to God, but to Satan. They also cut off his big toe, and he is made to hold it up like a Host and say, This is my body, the keenwitted Angelo observing that it's the first time he's told anything like the truth in fifty years of systematic lying.

She had heard all about excluded middles ; they were bad shit, to be avoided...

You could fall in love with me, you can talk to my shrink, you can hide a tape recorder in my bedroom, see what I talk about from wherever I am when I sleep. You want to do that? You can put together clues, develop a thesis, or several, about why characters reacted to the Trystero possibility the way they did, why the assassins came on, why the black costumes. You could waste your life that way and never touch the truth.

Oedipa wondered whether, at the end of this (if it were supposed to end), she too might not be left with only compiled memories of clues, announcements, intimations, but never the central truth itself, which my somehow each time be too bring for her memory to hold; which must always blaze out, destroying its own message irreversibly, leaving an overexposed blank when the ordinary world came back.

Of course it happened. Of course it didn't happen.

They'd never heard it that way. Went on warming their hands at an invisible fire. Oedipa, to retaliate, stopped believing in them.

Women could protest from now till piss flowed uphill, but the truth was, there wasn't one didn't secretly love a killer. And

Tutto questo mentre stavano imparando l'unica lezione della vita: che nella vita di un individuo accadono più incidenti di quanto un uomo possa ammettere, se non vuole correre il rischio di impazzire.

He had no illusions about what could be done in the darkroom to enhance a human image, but Erlys, who had always been beautiful, was beyond all that now. Years of bitterness about how little she loved him sloughed away and Merle understood, miles down the line, the simple truth that Erlys had no more been his than the unfortunate Bert Snidells's, and that to persist in that belief anymore was to approach the gates of the laughing academy.

The act of metaphor then was a thrust at truth and lie, depending where you were: inside, safe, or outside, lost.

they spoke of what they knew

Whatever we wish to achieve in the future, it must begin by knowing where we are in the present- not where we wish we were, or where we wish others to think we are, but where we are in fact.

The New York Times' long-standing motto, "All the News That's Fit to Print" should be changed to reflect today's reality: "Manufacturing News to Fit an Ideology.

Reality does not go away when it is ignored.

Where beliefs are not checked against facts, but instead facts must meet the test of consonance with the prevailing vision, we are in the process of sealing ourselves off from feedback from reality. Heedless of the past, we are flying blind into the future.

Justice at all costs' is not justice.

People will forgive you for being wrong, but they will never forgive you for being right—especially if events prove you right while proving them wrong.

Too much of what is called 'education' is little more than an expensive isolation from reality.

In the complexities of real life, seldom is any argument right 100 percent of the time or wrong 100 percent of the time.

Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passions, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.… —John Adams1

Whites walk on eggshells for fear of being called racists, while many blacks are preoccupied with protecting the image of black students, rather than protecting their future by telling the blunt truth. It is understandable that some people are concerned about image, about what in private life might be expressed as: "What will the neighbors think?" But, when your children are dying, you don't worry about what the neighbors think.

Some things are believed because they are demonstrably true. But many other things are believed simply because they have been asserted repeatedly—and repetition has been accepted as a substitute for evidence.

When you want to help people, you tell them the truth. When you want to help yourself, you tell them what they want to hear. People with careers as ethnic leaders usually tell their followers what they want to hear.

Too much of what is called education is little more than an expensive isolation from reality.