Quotes About Truth

We knew many things, and much that is false. He knew nature, which is always true

Yet literal-mindedness is not honesty or fidelity to truth--far from it. For it is the whole experience of mankind that sexual life is always, and must always be, hidden by veils of varying degrees of opacity, if it is to be humanized into something beyond a mere animal function. What is inherently secretive, that is to say self-conscious and human, cannot be spoken of directly; the attempt leads only to crudity, not to truth.

The need always to lie and always to avoid the truth stripped everyone of what Custine called 'the two greatest gifts of God—the soul and the speech which communicates it.' People became hypocritical, cunning, mistrustful, cynical, silent, cruel, and indifferent to the fate of others as a result of the destruction of their own souls.

Facts are much more malleable than prejudices.

Zweig would have dismissed our modern emotional incontinence as a sign not of honesty but of an increasing inability or unwillingness truly to feel.

If humankind, as T. S. Eliot put it, cannot bear very much reality, it seems that it can bear any amount of unreality.

The French state insists that once someone becomes French by citizenship, his ancestors become, metaphorically speaking, the Gauls, and he is therefore not to be distinguished from any other Frenchman, in statistics or anywhere else. It would take considerable conceptional subtlety as well as empirical knowledge to disentangle the truth and lies of all this.

We have sunk to a depth in which re-statement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men.

Alma-Tadema and Frédéric could paint nothing that was truthful either to the world or to themselves.

If Custine were among us now, he would recognise the evil of political correctness at once, because of the violence that it does to people's souls by forcing them to say or imply what they do not believe but must not question.

THE most hopeful adage of political folklore is: "One man plus the truth makes a majority.

History is always best written generations after the event, when clouded fact and memory have all fused into what can be accepted as truth, whether it be so or not.

My basic principle is that you don't make decisions because they are easy you don't make them because they are cheap you don't make them because they're popular you make them because *they're right*.

Outward judgment often fails, inward judgment never.

Truth never yet fell dead in the streets; it has such affinity with the soul of man, the seed however broadcast will catch somewhere and produce its hundredfold.

The books that help you most are those which make you think that most. The hardest way of learning is that of easy reading; but a great book that comes from a great thinker is a ship of thought, deep freighted with truth and beauty.

The books that help you most are those which make you think the most. A great book that comes from a great thinker is a ship of thought, deep freighted with truth and beauty.

One of our defects as a nation is a tendency to use what have been called "weasel words." When a weasel sucks eggs the meat is sucked out of the egg. If you use a "weasel word" after another there is nothing left of the other.

A typical vice of American politics is the avoidance of saying anything real on real issues.

Americanism means the virtues of courage, honor, justice, truth, sincerity, and hardihoodthe virtues that made America. The things that will destroy America are prosperity-at-any-price, peace-at-any-price, safety-first instead of duty-first, the love of soft living and the get-rich-quick theory of life.

Liar' is just as ugly a word as 'thief,' because it implies the presence of just as ugly a sin in one case as in the other. If a man lies under oath or procures the lie of another under oath, if he perjures himself or suborns perjury, he is guilty under the statute law.

Justice consists not in being neutral between right and wrong, but finding out the right and upholding it, wherever found, against the wrong.

Most of the men had simple souls. They could relate facts, but they said very little about what they dimly felt.

The power of the journalist is great, but he is entitled neither to respect nor admiration because of that power unless it is used aright.