Quotes About Truth

Doublespeak turns lies told by politicians into "being economical with the truth," sewage sludge into "regulated organic nutrients" that do not stink but "exceed the odor threshold," the death of a patient in a hospital into "negative patient care outcome," an explosion and fire in a nuclear power plant into an "energetic disassembly" and "rapid oxidation.

Walt Whitman was not the first to observe that we are all naked under our clothes, but he was one of the greatest, if not the first, to preach a gospel of nudity.

I fancy you may tell the truth about yourself. But all of it? The black truth, which we all know ourselves in our heats, or only the whity-brown truth of the pericardium, or the nice, whitened truth of the shirtfront? Even you [Mark Twain] won't tell the black heart's-truth. The man who could do it would be famed to the last day the sun shown upon.

I wish you to believe whatever you think is true, at any and every cost.

mere tabloid journalists, obliged to choose between the word of a Tory MP and that of a common prostitue, have been far too stupid to see that you can put your mortgage on the latter being true.

If I profess, with the loudest voice and the clearest exposition, every portion of the truth of God except precisely that little point which the world and the devil are at that moment attacking, I am not confessing Christ, however boldly I may be professing Christianity.

If there are no absolutes by which to judge society, then society is absolute.

So, the world happens twice-- once what we see it as; second it legends itself deep, the way it is.

A speech is something you say so as to distract attention from what you do not say.

God deliver us all from prejudice and unkindness, and fill us with the love of truth and virtue.

A man might pass for insane who should see things as they are.

God is another name for human intelligence raised above all error and imperfection, and extended to all possible truth.

To be prosperous is not to be superior, and should form no barrier between men. Wealth ought not to secure the prosperous the slightest consideration. The only distinctions which should be recognized are those of the soul, of strong principle, of incorruptible integrity, of usefulness, of cultivated intellect, of fidelity in seeking the truth.

Truth is a demure lady, much too ladylike to knock you on your head and drag you to her cave. She is there, but people must want her, and seek her out.

The superstition that the hounds of truth will rout the vermin of error seems, like a fragment of Victorian lace, quaint, but too brittle to be lifted out of the showcase.

Always speak and act the truth, and be kind to all who need your help.

He [the writer] must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid; and, teaching himself that, forget it forever, leaving no room in his workshop for anything but the old verities and truths of the heart, the old universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed—love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice.

Women lie about their age men lie about their income.

...the taste of the finely-worded truth rolled upon the tongue as its thought is revolved in the mind.

Is it for the cultivated man, the man of broad and general views, to throw himself without reserve and with all his weight, into what, for aught he yet knows, may be only a cross-current and eddy, instead of the main stream of truth?

If it is not beautiful for someone, it does not exist.

Most people are clever because they don't know how to be honest." William Gaddis, The Recognitions.

Truth had hanged the way the landscape had changed to accommodate progress, altered by each generation to its purpose. He had learned from the talk of old men that there was no such thing as truth, truth was always shaded by perception and expectation.

He thinks he's all aces but he's mostly sevens and eights.