Quotes About Truth

I used to say to my bubbe, 'Bubbe, is this story true?' And she'd say, 'Of course it's true! But it may not have happened.' What my bubbe was saying is profound: All stories are true. The truth is the journey you take through it - did it make you laugh, cry, seek and want justice? Then it's true.

It used to be, everyone was entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts. But that's not the case anymore. Facts matter not at all. Perception is everything.

Sometimes legends make reality, and become more useful than the facts.

The trust of the innocent is the liar's most useful tool.

The primary task of a useful teacher is to teach his students to recognize 'inconvenient' facts - I mean facts that are inconvenient for their party opinions.

It is a profound and necessary truth that the deep things in science are not found because they are useful; they were found because it was possible to find them.

I guess I found it useful to realise that everything is true at once, you know? You can pull back and say, 'Everything will be fine,' but you can also be in a situation and say, 'Not everything is going to be fine.'

Quotations are useful in periods of ignorance or obscurantist beliefs.

Without free speech no search for truth is possible... no discovery of truth is useful.

When part of what you're trying to get at is the truth hidden under a taboo, or when you want to nail a hypocrisy, laughter is a very useful tool. I want to show the painful side of existence, but there is no question I also want to make people laugh.

Easy answers are never really useful ones, so hopefully we're not trying to peddle easy answers.

I think overdesigning comes from a lack of editing. The strongest, most compelling, and most useful things in life are irreducible - love, truth, faith, honor.

Being a historian, if only for the day, teaches you useful things like judgment, and the ability to detect when someone is lying to you.

When we human beings hypothesize that a law of nature holds - even temporarily or situationally - we are creating an idea, but we are also making a hypothesis about how nature behaves, whose truth or usefulness has nothing to do with what we know or believe.

Two important characteristics of maps should be noticed. A map is not the territory it represents, but, if correct, it has a similar structure to the territory, which accounts for its usefulness.

The usefulness of religion - the fact that it gives life meaning, that it makes people feel good - is not an argument for the truth of any religious doctrine. It's not an argument that it's reasonable to believe that Jesus really was born of a virgin or that the Bible is the perfect word of the creator of the universe.

Accusations are useless.

Nothing is so useless as a general maxim.

You'd expect, as good Darwinian creatures, we would evolve to be fascinated with how the world really is, and we would use language to convey real-world information, we'd be obsessed with knowing the way things are, and we would entirely reject stories that aren't true. They're useless. But that's not the way we work.

In academic life, false ideas are merely false, and useless ones can be fun to play with.

I was never a steroid user at all, at least not knowingly.

The fundamental truth for developers is they will build if there are users.

Whether in cave paintings or the latest uses of the Internet, human beings have always told their histories and truths through parable and fable. We are inveterate storytellers.

The scientific method actually correctly uses the most direct evidence as the most reliable, because that's the way you are least likely to get led astray into dead ends and to misunderstand your data.