Quotes About Truth

Live in the all,' " Melville wrote to Hawthorne. What nonsense!… This "all" feeling…there is some truth in. You must often have felt it, lying on the grass on a warm summer's day. Your legs seem to send out shoots into the earth. Your hair feels like leaves upon your head. This is the all feeling. But what plays the mischief with the truth is that men will insist upon the universal application of a temporary feeling or opinion.

You're entitled to your own opinions and your own fantasies, but not your own facts—especially if your fantastical facts hurt people.

Sixteen hundred years ago Saint Augustine instructed, basically, Don't be stupid. "Shall we say, then," he wrote about Genesis, "there was such a sense of hearing in that formless and shapeless creation, whatever it was, to which God thus uttered a sound when He said, 'Let there be light'? Let such absurdities have no place in our thoughts.

If you're fanatical enough about enacting and enforcing your fiction, it becomes indistinguishable from nonfiction

In America from the late 1960s on, equality came to mean not just that the law should treat everyone identically but that your beliefs about anything are equally as true as anyone else's. As the principle of absolute tolerance became axiomatic in our culture and internalized as part of our psychology—What I believe is true because I want and feel it to be true—individualism turned into rampant solipsism.

J.R.R. Tolkien, had it right in the lecture he gave just after he published The Hobbit. "Fantasy," he said in 1939, talking about fantastical prose fiction, "is a natural human activity. It certainly does not destroy or even insult Reason; and it does not either blunt the appetite for, nor obscure the perception of, scientific verity. On the contrary. The keener and the clearer is the reason, the better fantasy will it make.

As we let a hundred dogmatic iterations of reality bloom, the eventual result was an anything-goes relativism that extends beyond religion to almost every kind of passionate belief: If I think it's true, no matter why or how I think it's true, then it's true, and nobody can tell me otherwise. That's the real-life reductio ad absurdum of American individualism. And it would become a credo of Fantasyland.

You are entitled to your own opinion, but you are not entitled to your own facts.

Unceasingly we are bombarded with pseudo-realities. Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away." —PHILIP K. DICK

Keeping an open mind is a virtue," Carl Sagan wrote in The Demon-Haunted World, the last book he published, but "not so open that your brains fall out…. I have a foreboding of an America when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness." That was twenty years ago.

We have fiction mimicking truth, and truth mimicking fiction. We have a dangerous overlap, a dangerous blur. And in all probability it is not deliberate. In fact, that is part of the problem.

America from the late 1960s on, equality came to mean not just that the law should treat everyone identically but that your beliefs about anything are equally as true as anyone else's.

He was saving innocents and serving truth. And in the final judgement, what is more important? The burdens we bear -- or the way we bear them?

Birds are and always have been reincarnated old men with Tourette's syndrome having somehow managed to dupe the reproductive saga. They fuck each other and tend to their home repairs and children while never missing their true mission. To scream at the top of their lungs in horrified hellish rage every morning at daybreak to warn us all of the truth. They know the truth. Screaming bloody murder all over the world in our ears, but sadly we don't speak bird.

I would rather be hated for what I am, then loved for what I am not.

The worst crime is faking it

Birds scream at the top of their lungs in horrified hellish rage every morning at daybreak to warn us all of the truth, but sadly we don't speak bird.

In a market, preceptions could be as important as reality. p.403

with growing horror. People at the school had lied to them directly, pretending I was making up stories. The tape ended. No one spoke. "Well?" I asked. "I'm calling your lawyer," my mother finally said. "And," my father added, "let's call your friend at Health and Human Services." He shook his head, a fury on his face unlike any I had ever seen. "We're going to destroy this school," he muttered coldly.

Never lie, assess character, appeal to principles, answer every question, and determine what impediments might keep them from speaking. Reporters need persistence, not the name of some major publication behind them, to crack a story.

I don't believe in empirical science. I only believe in a priori truth.

The meaning of world is the separation of wish and fact.

Bemerkung: Sonderbarerweise sind auch die Tatsachen, welche wir absolut sicher wissen (2 + 2 = 4, ich heiße Kurt) aus Begriffen zusammengesetzt, die wir nicht vollkommen verstehen (und die sehr kompliziert sind). 2 Erklärungen dafür: 1.) Das Einfache in der Welt sind die Tatschen und nicht die Begriffe. 2.) Diese sicheren Tatschen sind so, dass sie bei einem sehr weiten Spielraum von möglichen Interpretationen für Begriffe gelten.

But, despite their remoteness from sense experience, we do have something like a perception of the objects of set theory, as is seen from the fact that the axioms force themselves upon us as being true. I don't see any reason why we should have less confidence in this kind of perception, i.e., in mathematical intuition, than in sense perception.