Quotes About Truth

Fiction is the lie that helps us understand the truth.

A lie, sometimes, can be truer than the truth, which is why fiction gets written.

It wasn't a question of deceit. Just the opposite; he wanted to heat up the truth, to make it burn so hot that you would feel exactly what he felt.

you can tell a true war story if it embarrasses you. If you don't care for obscenity, you don't care for the truth; if you don't care for the truth, watch how you vote. Send guys to war, they come home talking dirty.

Anyhow, it's not so bad.... I mean, when you're dead, you just have to be yourself.

The great enemy of the truth is very often not the lie - deliberate, contrived and dishonest - but the myth, persistent, persuasive, and unrealistic. Belief in myths allows the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought." ~ John F. Kennedy

Si te liberas de esa compulsión, pensó Paul de pronto, si escapas de esa necesidad de engatusar y convencer y seducir, lo que quede después serás tú, tu verdadero ser.

It took Descartes to deduce that God would not wish to deceive us. The world must be as it appears to be, the Frenchman deduced, because a perfect God would never wish to deceive us. Nothing has been explicable since.

You think we're hiding our secret mastery of the galaxy. In reality, we're hiding something else. Something much worse.

The idea of truth as a consolation is a real one. We all face a death sentence, and we all want to believe in something that is demonstrably true. Religion in the shape of an institution, a set of dogmas and a body of doctrine, is not in this sense a help: it demands an act of faith, an acceptance that it must be true, even if, or especially because, empirical evidence is not available, and anyway, if you could see it was unarguably true, what would be the virtue of faith?

You don't ever know what anyone's really like,' I said 'Cause you do.' 'How?' 'They tell you; you tell them.' 'That's assuming you're honest. What if you lie?' 'Why would you want to lie?

Talk never goes up in price, it's always free, and you usually get what you pay for.

Life can be complicated; the truth is not.

Winners don't fear reality, they don't hide from the truth, and they're not afraid to confront their own flaws and weaknesses.

That's how it is with legends. The greater they sound, the more must've got left out.

and throughout the summer and fall of 2002, the president and his aides prepared the battlefield of the American mind with apocalyptic warnings about Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction: Baghdad had chemical and biological weapons, and it could build a nuclear weapon in a few years. The alarms were terrifying, and utterly false. The cause for war was an illusion.

The president of the Russian Academy of Military Sciences, Makhmut Gareyev, a retired general who had served in the Red Army from 1941 to 1992, was highly attuned to the power of disinformation as an instrument of war: "The systematic broadcasting of … partially truthful and false items" could create "mass psychosis, despair and feelings of doom, and undermine trust in the government … creating a fruitful soil for actions of the enemy.

Yeah, it's a cover-up," Nixon said. "The cover-up is worse than whatever comes out. It really is—unless somebody is going to jail.

On September 4, General Philip Breedlove, NATO's top military commander, said this cascade of lies was an aspect of "the most amazing information warfare blitzkrieg we have ever seen." The message from the Kremlin was that reality could be bent to its will, because objective truth did not exist, and thus falsehoods could trump facts.

As Kennan had written in the Long Telegram back in February 1946: "The very disrespect of Russians for objective truth—indeed, their disbelief in its existence—leads them to view all stated facts as instruments for furtherance of one ulterior purpose or another." Now the internet could magnify their clandestine ambitions a millionfold.

The United States did little in direct response to Putin's war on truth. "We had a massive information gap," Ambassador Nuland said. "We didn't have the kind of intelligence assets where we could prove that he was lying about Russian involvement.

Marat Mindiyarov, an unemployed teacher who lasted four months at the IRA, said the job required him "to write that white is black and black is white. Your first feeling, when you ended up there, was that you were in some kind of factory that turned lying, telling untruths, into an industrial assembly line.

Where were the weapons of mass destruction? he asked. Did they exist at all? They did not, Saddam said. It had been a long-running bluff, a deception intended to keep the Iranians, the Israelis, and the Americans at bay. "We destroyed them. We told you," he told Piro on February 13, 2004. "By God, if I had such weapons, I would have used them in the fight against the United States." He was telling the truth. The

Diogenes's central point is in effect the same as mine: that officially sanctioned religious records only tell you when worship seems to work and excise all evidence to the contrary.