Quotes About Truth

I'm not a liar, sir,' she said. 'No, I'm sure you sincerely become whatever it is you're pretending to be.

Sometimes, what's right is not peaceful or passive. What matters is that you do not hide from the consequences. You bear what must be borne.

I think you can't possibly know the truth about somebody unless you love them.

For it is in the millions of small melodies that the truth of history is always found, for history only matters because of the effects we see or imagine in the lives of the ordinary people who are caught up in, or give shape to, the great events.

Everything possible to be believed is an image of truth. -Taleswapper

It's all just fictions anyway. We do what we do and then we make up reasons for it afterward but they're never the true reasons, the truth is always just out of reach.

No one can know a false thing, one can only believe it with certainty until it is contradicted. (Page 7)

Where ideas are real and reality is shadow.

Ender was a destroyer, but what he destroyed was illusion, and the illusion had to die...the truth about ourselves. Somehow this ancient man is able to see the truth and it doesn't blind his eyes or drive him mad. I must listen to this voice and let its power come to me so I, too, can stare at the light and not die.

If you did not in your own mind distinguish between useful and erroneous information, then you were not learning at all, you were merely replacing ignorance with false belief, which was no improvement.

Do not be disingenuous with me, Colonel Graff. Americans are quite apt at playing stupid when they choose to, but I am not to be deceived.

I am a disbeliever in the unbelievable.

Because human nature never changes.

Today, one of the brothers asked me: Is it a terrible prison, not to be able to move from the place where you're standing? You answered... I told him that I am now more free than he is. The inability to move frees me from the obligation to act. You who speak languages, you are such liars.

You don't have to eat the entire turd to know that it's not a crab cake.

It [seed of doubt] made Ender listen to what people meant, instead of what they said. It made him wise.

I know that you are wise. When you hear a true story, there is a part of you that responds to it regardless of art, regardless of evidence…You believe that the story is true, because you responded to it from that sense of truth deep within you. But that sense of truth does not respond to a story's factuality...[rather] to a story's causality - whether it faithfully shows the way the universe functions.

But then, I would rather be mocked for doing a good thing than to be respected, knowing I have done wrong.

Sophisticated people seem to think that the truth must always be dark, disappointing, disillusioning. But this is not so at all. Most of the time, darkness, disappointment, and disillusionment are the illusion. Truth is neutral. Our decisions determine what darkens and what lightens our lives.

In the end it was only Peter who had something he could say from the heart. Am I the only one here who sees something of himself in the man who's lying inside this box? No one had an answer for him, either yes or no.

Orson Scott Card

I thought speakers didn't believe in sin, said a sullen boy. Andrew smiled. You believe in sin, Styrka, and you do things because of that belief. So sin is real in you, and knowing you, this speaker must believe in sin.

This is all so silly,' said Diko. 'Who cares about what's real and what isn't real? [...] And as for our own history, the parts that will be lost, who cares if a mathematician calls us dirty names like unreal? They say such slanders about the square root of minus two as well.

If you spend your whole life pretending to be good, then you are indistinguishable from a good person. Relentless hypocrisy eventually becomes the truth.