Quotes About Truth

Few of us can hold on to our real selves long enough to discover the momentous truths about ourselves and this whirling earth to which we cling. This is especially true of men [and women] in war. The great god Mars tries to blind us when we enter his realm, and when we leave he gives us a generous cup of the waters of Lethe to drink. -- J. Glenn Gray, The Warriors: Reflections of Men in Battle

After years on a drunken bender, Americans are awakening to lies masked in patriotism and glory.

When facts are treated as if they were opinions, when there is no universal standard by which to determine truth in law, in science, in scholarship, or in the reporting of events of the day, the world becomes a place where lies become true, where people can believe what they want to believe, where there is no possibility of reaching any conclusion not predetermined by those who interpret the official, divinely inspired text.

The ability to amplify lies, to repeat them and have surrogates repeat them in endless loops of news cycles, gives lies and mythical narratives the aura of uncontested truth. We become trapped in the linguistic prison of incessant repetition. We are fed words and phrases like war on terror or pro-life or change, and within these narrow parameters, all complex thought, ambiguity, and self-criticism vanish.

But reconciliation, self-awareness, and finally the humility that makes peace possible come only when culture no longer serves a cause or a myth but the most precious and elusive of all human narratives—truth.

When a nation becomes unmoored from reality, it retreats into a world of magic. Facts are accepted or discarded according to the dictates of a preordained cosmology. The search for truth becomes irrelevant.

Moral courage is the courage to act and to speak the truth.

A public that can no longer distinguish between truth and fiction is left to interpret reality through illusion.

Miller captures in the play the darkest pathology of white America—the inability to accept who we are, where we came from, acknowledge and take responsibility for the crimes we committed and with that understanding access where we are going and who we want to become. The danger of self-delusion is the central point of Miller's play.

The sentencing of Manning marked the day when the state formally declared that all who name and expose its crimes will become political prisoners or will be forced, like Snowden, to flee into exile.

He was well aware, like Hugo, that good people were usually relentlessly persecuted, were rarely rewarded for virtue, and that those who held fast to truth and justice often found the way to their own cross.

Paine's power, like Orwell's and Baldwin's, lay in his refusal to be anyone's propagandist. He told people, even people who supported him, what they often did not want to hear.

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," Hannah Arendt wrote in The Origins of Totalitarianism.67

The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exists. HANNAH ARENDT, The Origins of Totalitarianism

Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities," Voltaire warned.

I can tell you categorically that we at 60 Minutes did not pay Michael Jackson one cent.

The miracle of your mind isn't that you can see the world as it is. It's that you can see the world as it isn't.

No history can be a faithful mirror. If it were, it would be as long and as dull as life itself. It must be a selection, and, being a selection, must inevitably be biased.

Nothing I do is didactic. I just want to hold up a mirror and say, 'This is who we are.'

I don't think anyone wants to look in the mirror and say, 'I'm anti-woman.' They don't see themselves that way, and you can't treat them that way. But you have to tell the truth.

Different things made 'Cheers' and 'Frasier' special. Both of them, though, were honest. It was the old Shakespeare thing: Hold the mirror up to life.

I am an actor and this is holding the mirror up to nature, as it were.

I have always believed that your face is a mirror to your nature.

It's very hard to look at the man in the mirror. Because you can't hide anything.