Quotes About Truth

Sarcasm is when you tell someone the truth by lying on purpose.

I suppose we'll never know what really happened in that room, though he did tell police, I did it because I'm a dirty dog. This is not a very convincing alibi. He may as well have said, I got 99 problems, but a bitch ain't one.

We assume that all statements must be mild inversions of the truth, because it's too weird to imagine people who aren't casually lying, pretty much all the time.

By now, everyone I know is one of seven strangers, inevitably hoping to represent a predefined demographic and always failing horribly. The Read World is the real world is The Real World is the read world. It's the same true story, even when it isn't.

History is a creative process (or as Napoleon Bonaparte once said, "a set of lies agreed upon"). The world happens as it happens, but we construct what we remember and what we forget. And people will eventually do that to us, too.

But this is how popular culture works: You allow yourself to be convinced you're sharing a reality that doesn't exist.

We spend our lives learning many things, only to discover (again and again) that most of what we've learned is either wrong or irrelevant. A big part of our mind can handle this; a smaller, deeper part cannot. And it's that smaller part that matters more, because that part of our mind is who we really are (whether we like it or not).

And this, of course, is the central problem with conspiracy theorists — once you inflexibly accept that something is a conspiracy, any contrary evidence has the paradoxical effect of making your case stronger. Every contradiction deepens the conspiracy.

I think the larger sect of liars are people who think they are telling the truth, but who really have no idea what the truth is.

Self-deception allows us to create a consistent narrative for ourselves that we actually believe. I'm not saying that the truth doesn't matter. It does. But self-deception is how we survive.

Nothing is completely authentic. Even the guys who kill themselves are partially acting.

In baseball and sex, cliches are usually true: pitching beats hitting, and people always want to be loved by anyone who doesn't seem to care.

We now have immediate access to all possible facts. Which is almost the same as having none at all.

Tricks Aren't Illusions

In other words, people who don't know better are often wrong by accident, and people who do know better are sometimes wrong on purpose—and whenever a modern news story explodes, everyone recognizes that possibility. But we question this far less when the information comes from the past. It's so hard to get viable info about pre-twentieth-century life that any nugget is reflexively taken at face value.

Something that's only metaphorically alive can never be literally dead.

The world happens as it happens, but we construct what we remember and what we forget. And people will eventually do that to us, too.

We spend our lives learning many things, only to discover (again and again) that most of what we've learned is either wrong or irrelevant. A big part of our mind can handle this; a smaller, deeper part cannot. And it's that smaller part that matters more, because that part of our mind is who we really are (whether we like it or not).

Whenever someone says something that's both realistic and abhorrent, It makes me suspect everyone else is lying about everything else.

I don't need to personally agree with something in order to recognize that it's true.

The practical reality is that any present-tense version of the world is unstable. What we currently consider to be true—both objectively and subjectively—is habitually provisional.

Its easier to believe there's a monster under the bed if you've spent the last six months arguing with a monster.

The Bible is the only book that hangs its entire credibility on its ability to write history in advance, without error.

The Scripture is inexhaustible—you can never get to the bottom of its depth. And that's what you would expect from the Word of God.