Quotes About Truth

It was one of the great myths of that time that foreign policy was this pure and uncontaminated area which was never touched by domestic politics, and that domestic politics ended at the water's edge. The truth, in sharp contrast, was that all those critical decisions were primarily driven by considerations of domestic politics, and by political fears of the consequences of looking weak in a forthcoming domestic election.

The closer journalists came to great issues, the more vulnerable they felt.

Everyone else was trying to make things more complicated and Cronkite, typically, was trying to make them more simple.

Education was central to reporting.

You could never prove innocence, not in the match with the man who only had to imply guilt.

If the norm of the society is corrupted, then objective journalism is corrupted too, for it must not challenge the norm. It must accept the norm.

We need to get behind the surface appearances if we are to act coherently in the world. Otherwise, acting in response to misleading surface signals typically produces disastrous outcomes.

Empiricism assumes that objects can be understood independendy of observing subjects. Truth is therefore assumed to lie in a world external to the observer whose job is to record and faithfully reflect the attributes of objects. This logical empiricism is a pragmatic version of that scientific method which goes under the name of 'logical positivism', and is founded in a particular and very strict view of language and meaning.

David Herbert Donald

Tragedy is like strong acid - it dissolves away all but the very gold of truth.

Reason is a supple nymph, and slippery as a fish by nature. She had as leave give her kiss to an absurdity any day, as to syllogistic truth. The absurdity may turn out truer.

Since obscenity is the truth of our passion today, it is the only stuff of art - or almost the only stuff.

My great religion is a belief in the blood, the flesh, as being wiser than the intellect. We can go wrong in our minds. But what our blood feels and believes and says, is always true. The intellect is only a bit and a bridle.

All vital truth contains the memory of all that for which it is not true.

It is very good advice to believe only what an artist does, rather than what he says about his work.

All the annoying stuff people spout about your loved ones being in a better place, or not being in pain is just words they say to make themselves feel better.

The whole history of the radical past, from Trotsky on, warned that my individual truth would have little effect on the attitude of the left. Confronted by such a truth, the left would seek first to ignore and then to discredit it, because it was damaging to the progressive cause.

One could drive a schooner through any part of his argument and never scrape against a fact.

Truth springs from argument amongst friends.

Any person seasoned with a just sense of the imperfections of natural reason, will fly to revealed truth with the greatest avidity.

A wise man proportions his belief to the evidence

Truth, springs from agrument amongst friends.

it is possible for the same thing both to be and not to be.

In public affairs men are often better pleased that the truth, though known to everybody, should be wrapped up under a decent cover than if it were exposed in open daylight to the eyes of all the world.