Quotes About Truth

Spirituality is a brave search for the truth about existence, fearlessly peering into the mysterious nature of life.

It might be crazy to expect a high government official to speak the truth. It might be crazy to believe that government policy will be something more than the handmaiden of the most powerful interests. It might be crazy to argue that we should preserve a tradition that has been part of our tradition for most of our history -- free culture. If this is crazy, then let there be more crazies. Soon.

We spend our lives fighting to get people very slightly more stupid than ourselves to accept truths that the great men have always known.

The great secret that all old people share is that you really haven't changed in seventy or eighty years. Your body changes, but you don't change at all. And that, of course, causes great confusion.

I do not think writers ought ever to sit down and think they must write about some cause, or theme ... If they write about their own experiences, something true is going to emerge.

At no time, anywhere, was the population of a country told the truth: facts about events trickled into general consciousness much later, if ever.

In times of war, as everyone knows, who has lived through one, or talked to soldiers when they are allowing themselves to remember the truth, and not the sentimentalities with which we all shield ourselves from the horrors of which we are capable ... in times of war we revert, as a species, to the past, and are permitted to be brutal and cruel. It is for this reason, and of course others, that a great many people enjoy war. But this is one of the facts about war that is not often talked about.

I don't know why I still find it so hard to accept that words are faulty and by their very nature inaccurate.

You and I are the boulder-pushers. All our lives, you and I, we'll put all our energies, all our talents into pushing a great boulder up a mountain. The boulder is the truth that the great men know by instinct, and the mountain is the stupidity of mankind.

The relativism which is not willing to speak about truth but only about 'what is true for me' is an evasion of the serious business of living. It is the mark of a tragic loss of nerve in our contemporary culture. It is a preliminary symptom of death.

One does not learn anything except by believing something, and -- conversely -- if one doubts everything one learns nothing. On the other hand, believing everything uncritically is the road to disaster. The faculty of doubt is essential. But as I have argued, rational doubt always rests on faith and not vice versa. The relationship between the two cannot be reversed.

A person who wields power cannot see truth; that is the privilege of the powerless.

If we cannot speak with confidence about biblical authority, what ground have we for challenging the reigning plausibility structure?

Modern science has placed in human hands the power to do things that were previously unimaginable. Technology, the development of ever more sophisticated means for achieving any end we choose, dominates modern and modernized societies. But there is a growing perception that science and technology are no substitute for wisdom - for the power to discern what ends are in accordance with the truth and the power to judge rightly between alternative ends.

If the relativist claims that, since all reasoning is embodied in a particular social context, no claim to know the truth can be sustained, one has to ask for the basis on which this claim is made. It is, after all, a claim to know something about reality — namely that reality is unknowable.

the authority of Jesus is ultimate, the

It has often been said that during the period of liberal Protestantism, when innumerable "lives of Jesus" were written, designed to help educated middle-class Europeans and Americans to respond to the gospel, the portraits that resulted were very obviously self-portraits. They told you more about the writer than about Jesus.

To maintain, in this new situation, the old missionary attitude is not merely inexcusable but positively dangerous. In a world threatened with nuclear war, a world facing a global ecological crisis, a world more and more closely bound together in its cultural and economic life, the paramount need is for unity, and an aggressive claim on the part of one of the world's religions to have the truth for all can only be regarded as treason against the human race.

postmodernists' replacement of eternal truths with a story. But there is a profound difference between the two. For the postmodernists, there are many stories, but no overarching truth by which they can be assessed. They are simply stories. The church's affirmation is that the story it tells, embodies, and enacts is the true story and that others are to be evaluated by reference to it.

The relativism which is not willing to speak about truth but only about "what is true for me" is an evasion of the serious business of living.

The scientist starts with the conviction that the world is rational and that events at different times and places in the natural world can be related to one another in a coherent way. Without this conviction, which is a matter of faith, he could not begin his work. But the goal of his work is to prove the truth of the faith from which he began, to prove it in ever new situations.

But we do not reach truth unless we allow ourselves to be exposed to and drawn by a truth which is beyond our present understanding.

I accept now with equanimity the question so constantly addressed to me, 'Are you an American' and merely return the accurate answer, 'Yes, I am a Canadian.'

The equation: truth = the proletarian world-view = Marxism = the party's world-view = the pronouncements of the party leadership = those of the supreme is wholly in accordance with Lenin's version of Marxism.