Quotes About Truth

In Haiti, as I understand it, storytelling and history itself are not a business of necessarily elucidating facts or the truth of an incident, but finding the version that is most entertaining and therefore will get retold and live in immortality.

The 'Times' is understood to be almost the unofficial biographer of the country, in some strange way to be printing a kind of quasi-neutral truth or even, in some people's minds, slightly center-left version of reality.

One of the great challenges of being a modern historian is interviewing multiple people who were all there for something, some event. No one's version matches up 100% with other people's, even if it's three or four people on a conference call.

The only rule I have in how I let characters tell stories is that they must always tell the reader their version of the truth. No one likes being outright lied to, even in fiction.

People who are deceptive themselves have a really good ear for deception. They know when somebody's telling the truth or not, and so one of the ways around that is to always be telling the truth - or some version of it.

I don't want to read about the fabricated version of someone's life. I want to know what haunts you, what are you ashamed of, what embarrasses you, what do you wish was different?

The only obligation you have as a film-maker is to tell your version of the truth and to use your film to illuminate reality. Whatever that means.

There is only one religion, though there are a hundred versions of it.

There is very much a sense of different versions of storytelling within our 'Camelot' - who tells those stories, who creates them, who shifts them.

I just feel that I don't agree with sensationalized versions of history or me. Any version that's sensationalized.

When there are multiple versions of a story, you really have three ways to go. You can pick the most sensational version. You can try to balance things in your gut to get to what you think is the honest truth. Or you can err on the side of kindness.

Reality has been so politicized such that people truly believe, mostly, that there are two versions of reality: a conservative and a liberal version. In my mind, there's only one version of reality and then those who lie about it. Much as in a court of law.

I've read a lot of different versions of myself - and all of them are true because it's all opinion, and they're as accurate as it can ever be. But I don't think that I've been deft at hiding parts of my personality.

I think there is some truth to the fact that yeah, okay, cool, obviously the more mainstream kind of easier-to-grasp-onto dance music has become popular, but that holds true with almost any genre. It wasn't like the Sex Pistols hit the radio. It was poppier versions of that is what hit. It's never, like, the true core stuff.

For 'Frost/Nixon,' everyone I spoke to told the story their way. Even people in the room tell different versions. There's no one truth about what happened in those interviews, so I feel very relaxed about bringing my imagination to the piece. God knows everyone else has.

You can't believe everything you read in a newspaper or everything that's coming out of the president's mouth. And you can't believe when someone posts a picture from their personal life, because most of the time, it's staged - we're showing each other these idealized versions of ourselves so that we seem better and other people will feel worse.

However, I've learned in my life that life is about living authentically. And for me, the best moments as I look back in my life, that I became the best versions of Jeannie that I'm proud of, was when I was honest with myself.

All these social media sites allow us to confuse truth and popularity. That has to be fixed. Because every normal citizen has a right to know what is factual versus what is amplified by good actors or bad actors.

I fantasize that our politicians have been moved by the dialogues of Plato, and thus contemplate the ancient conflict of the sophists versus the lovers of truth.

Government frequently has a problem recognizing perception versus reality.

The whole sort of debate of classic objective journalism versus a new immersion journalism - that can go on forever... I made no bones about my position: I don't think you can be objective.

How does the past ambush us? How can we be accurate about what happened, how can we be true to it? And can war be declared over? And can we ever evolve from the notion of war, of nations, of us versus them?

I don't believe that there are two sides to a story when it's a matter of right versus wrong. It just doesn't work that way.

Someone once told me that being in the closet is like living in a vertical casket. Perfect description.