Quotes About Truth

Free to call a spade a spade (and a cock a cock).

Not until she stood at her sink, splashing cold water on her face, did she remember her little hippo. What the hell was that about? When did her unconscious get so fucking whimsical? And what fine truth was he going to tell her?

the only truth left is my drunkenness, my sex, and my art.

the testimonies of especially Höss and to some extent Eichmann are confused, contradictory, self-serving, and not credible. -- The Origins of the Final Solution , page 544

I do not mind lying but I hate inaccuracy

The world will need sceptics after the war is over. Too many people are ready to believe anything they're told.

Life is one big bloody trick played on the unsuspecting.

It's what we find with most conspiracies—they only exist because somebody wants them to.

but you've been duped by a fake-news site.' The look of surprise on Maggie's face touched him. 'But how are people supposed to know that?' she asked, bewildered. That, thought Bryant, is what we're all wondering.

I used to be more refined but at my age, you start to realize all that politeness doesn't get you very far. Better to be honest and direct, even if it does piss off a few people along the way.

The child is father to the man" is a Romantic riddle that turns worldly hierarchy on its head. It means that the child is in some sense the superior of the man; the child is wiser than the man. Ironically, the eventual broad acceptance of this truth did not so much liberate the Victorian bourgeois as it haunted them and gave them a bad conscience. They sensed that the poets were right.

I became a journalist because I did not want to rely on newspapers for information.

I try to deny myself any illusions or delusions, and I think that this perhaps entitles me to try and deny the same to others, at least as long as they refuse to keep their fantasies to themselves.

In an average day, you may well be confronted with some species of bullying or bigotry, or some ill-phrased appeal to the general will, or some petty abuse of authority. If you have a political loyalty, you may be offered a shady reason for agreeing to a lie or a half-truth that serves some short-term purpose. Everybody devises tactics for getting through such moments; try behaving as if they need not be tolerated and are not inevitable.

Everything everyone thinks they know about [Mother Teresa] is false. It must be the single most successful emotional con job of the twentieth century.

There is some relationship between the hunger for truth and the search for the right words. This struggle may be ultimately indefinable and even undecidable, but one damn well knows it when one sees it.

Don't take security in the false refuge of consensus.

People know when they are being lied to, they know when their rulers are absurd, they know they do not love their chains.

Hardest of all, as one becomes older, is to accept that sapient remarks can be drawn from the most unwelcome or seemingly improbable sources, and that the apparently more trustworthy sources can lead one astray.

I want to live my life taking the risk - all the time - that I don't know anything like-enough yet, that I haven't understood enough, that I can't know enough, that I'm always hungrily operating on the margins of a potentially great harvest of future knowledge and wisdom...Take the risk of thinking for yourself, much more happiness, truth, beauty, and wisdom will come to you.

We can always be sure of one thing—that the messengers of discomfort and sacrifice will be stoned and pelted by those who wish to preserve at all costs their own contentment. This is not a lesson that is confined to the Testaments.

Indifferent to truth, willing to use police-state tactics and vulgar libels against inconvenient witnesses, hopeless on health care, and flippant and fast and loose with national security: The case against Hillary Clinton for president is open-and-shut. Of course, against all these considerations you might prefer the newly fashionable and more media-weighty notion that if you don't show her enough appreciation, and after all she's done for us, she may cry.

Did I ever think I might have been wrong? Yes, sometimes and briefly. But never because of the supposed majority against me.

But what [Orwell] illustrates, by his commitment to language as the partner of truth, is that 'views' do not really count; that it matters not what you think, but how you think; and that politics are relatively unimportant, while principles have a way of enduring, as do the few irreducible individuals who maintain allegiance to them.