Quotes About Truth

Adlai Stevenson once said to Richard Nixon: "If you stop telling lies about me I'll stop telling the truth about you.

Ignorance, to a scientist, is an itch that begs to be pleasurably scratched. Ignorance, if you are a theologian, is something to be washed away by shamelessly making something up.

What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence. This is even more true when the "evidence" eventually offered is so shoddy and self-interested.

You don't say 'they all do it' unless you know you've been doing it too.

Where questions of religion are concerned, people are guilty of every possible sort of dishonesty and intellectual misdemeanor.

To permit this gross new revelation to fade, or be forgiven, would be to devalue our most essential standard of what constitutes the unpardonable. And for what? For the reputation of a man who turns out to be not even a Holocaust denier but a Holocaust affirmer. There has to be a moral limit, and either this has to be it or we must cease pretending to ourselves that we observe one.

Whatever view one takes of the outcome being affected by morale, it seems certain that the realm of illusion must be escaped before anything else.

It's no fun to appreciate to the full the truth of the materialist proposition that I don't have a body, I am a body.

The anti-life of [Jerry Falwell] proves only one thing: that you can get away with the most extraordinary offenses to morality and truth in this country if you'll just get yourself called Reverend. People like that should be out in the street, shouting and hollering with a cardboard sign and selling pencils from a cup.

It is supposed to be an axiom of Western civilization that the individual, or the truth, may not be sacrificed to hypothetical benefits such as order.

This is a small episode in an unending argument between those who know they are right and therefore claim the mandate of heaven, and those who suspect that the human race has nothing but the poor candle of reason by which to light its way.

Mass delusion is the only thing that keeps a people sane.

This need to know things at the level of basic experience, and the reluctance to be fobbed off by the official story or the popular rumor, was a part of the "infinite capacity for taking pains" that Thomas Carlyle once described as the constituent of genius.

And it seems possible, moving to the psychological arena, that people can be better off believing in something than in nothing, however untrue that something may be.

I shall simply say that those who offer false consolation are false friends.

The Auden/Kallman relationship had this to be said for it: It affirmed that it's better to be blatant than latent.

Ethics do not require that lies be told to children by evil old men

Every day, the New York Times carries a motto in a box on its front page. All the News That's Fit to Print, it says. It's been saying it for decades, day in and day out. I imagine most readers of the canonical sheet have long ceased to notice this bannered and flaunted symbol of its mental furniture. I myself check every day to make sure that the bright, smug, pompous, idiotic claim is still there.

If the matter is one that can be settled by observation, make the observation yourself. Aristotle could have avoided the mistake of thinking that women have fewer teeth than men, by the simple device of asking Mrs. Aristotle to keep her mouth open while he counted. He did not do so because he thought he knew. Thinking that you know when in fact you don't is a fatal mistake, to which we are all prone.

If one must have faith in order to believe in something, then the likelihood of that something having any truth or value is considerably diminished. The harder work of inquiry, proof, and demonstration is infinitely more rewarding and has confronted us with findings far more miraculous and transcendent than any theology.

Only servility requires the realm of illusion.

Virtuous behavior by a believer is no proof at all of - indeed is not even an argument for - the truth of his belief.

arriésgate a pensar por ti mismo encontraras mas felicidad, verdad, belleza y sabiduría

he despised the alternative flow of information and insight, which was gossip and rumor. Like Winston Smith, he was first and foremost activated by a raging thirst to know: a thirst that could only be slaked by a personal quest for the least varnished version of the truth.