Quotes About Truth

In deploring spin while also desiring it, Barack Obama is like the rest of us. We denounce spin when we see it as misleading. But we embrace spin when we see it as leading.

In real life there is not, as there is in every jigsaw puzzle, one picture and one picture only, into which all the pieces will eventually fit," he wrote. "It is the totalitarian mind which thinks that there is one and only one picture.

Totalitarians never cease trying to rewrite history to their their own liking, but history is a stubborn old bastard that always outlives these feeble fantasies.

I'd rather know I can trust you. So before you read what's in that thing, tell me a story that squares with its details and exonerate yourself in my eyes. Tell me the story you should have told the sheriff right off the bat, when it wasn't too late, when the truth might still have given you your freedom. When the truth might have done you some good.

Tell the truth,' Nels said. 'Decide to tell the truth before it's too late.

Journalism is just the facts." He had been learning about journalism at school, from a textbook, and it seemed to him that his father had abridged some basic journalistic principle. "But which facts?" Arthur asked him. "Which facts do we print, Ishmael?

I have been trying to think clearly about everything and to use all this distance to advantage. And here is what I've discovered. I don't love you, Ishmael.

at the same time he knew that most elderly people were not wise at all but only wore a thin veneer of cheap wisdom as a sort of armor against the world.

Don't tell lies, or even exaggerate. At all. Ever. 3.

The act of writing is the act of discovering what you believe.

No one but a fool is always right.

Tonight, I've finally learned to tell fantasy from reality. And, knowing the difference, I choose fantasy.

For the myths of the East, the myths of the West, the myths of men, and the myths of women—these have so saturated our consciousness that truthful contact between nations and lovers can only be the result of heroic effort.

We must know. We will know.

Wir müssen wissen, wir werden wissen.

Only an idiot could believe that scientific truth needs martyrdom; that may be necessary in religion, but scientific results prove themselves in due time

Wir müssen wissen, wir werden wissen. Dobbiamo sapere, sapremo.

Alis grave nil. May language release you from its lies.

on. It took a Trump to look her in the eye with seventy million people watching during one of the presidential debates and say, "You are a liar and a crook," which she was both. Everybody knew it, but only Donald Trump dared to utter it out loud.

If I had a mission to name, it was about wrestling with the most powerful and pernicious of all human follies, which is the desire to stifle truth in the name of hope.

Most politicians use language to conceal what they think. Or to conceal the fact that they don't think. Many are trained as lawyers and use language to win support rather than to define the truth. Being blunt hasn't hurt me so far.

It is the human wish to be told lies that keeps us as primitive morally and socially as we are. But stoic realism is, after all, what being a conservative is about.

The next two essays, "My Vietnam Lessons" and "Semper Fidel," belong to this genre, and are attempts I made to confront our radical cohort with the harsh realities of what we had actually done. Vietnam was the defining issue of our generation but the events that unfolded proved that those of us who were active in the anti-war movement had been wrong on every critical point, and that our actions had tragic consequences for the people we claimed to be defending.

the biblical warning of Ecclesiastes: "In much knowledge is much grief, and he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow.