Quotes About Truth

Cooper uses the phrase "backbone of humility" to describe the tone of a good AAR. It's a useful phrase because it captures the paradoxical nature of the task: a relentless willingness to see the truth and take ownership.

I know what I like in other actors: truth. That's the best. It makes you say, 'OK, I'll go with you on this.'

The genuine truth, and I do think about this a lot, is that I'm one of the least competitive people you'll ever meet. Except with myself.

I'm not keen on history being tampered with... to any extent.

Things as certain as death and taxes, can be more firmly believed.

Justice is always violent to the party offending, for every man is innocent in his own eyes.

I hear much of people's calling out to punish the guilty, but very few are concerned to clear the innocent.

He that hath truth on his side is a fool as well as a coward if he is afraid to own it because fo other mens's opinions.

I am giving an account of what was, not of what ought or ought not to be.

They say I was afraid to stand up to a paper tiger. It is all such nonsense. What good would it have done me in the last hour of my life to know that though our great nation and the United States were in complete ruins, the national honor of the Soviet Union was intact?

I was struck, in fact, by President Johnson's reaction to these revelations as "close to treason," because it reflected to me this sense that what was damaging to the reputation of a particular administration, a particular individual, was in effect treason, which is very close to saying "I am the state." And I think that quite sincerely many Presidents, not only Lyndon Johnson, have come to feel that.

files in the McNamara study offices, I had discovered that this assumption was mistaken. Every one of these crucial decisions was secretly associated with realistic internal pessimism, deliberately concealed from the public, just as in 1964–65.

don't think it occurred to me in 1961 that the White House might be lying about what the president had been told.

remember someone saying that we were

Ours is such a system. We are in the grip of institutionalized madness.

see note to p. 249), which I can still recommend

Yes, but the whole point of the doomsday machine is lost if you keep it a secret! Why didn't you tell the world, eh? —Dr. Strangelove

How do we know that even the realest of realities wouldn't be subjective, in the final analysis? Nobody can prove his existence, can he?

Is it true? (Is the stressful or negative thought true?) 2. Can I absolutely know that it's true? 3. How do I react when I believe that thought? 4. Who would I be without the thought? Or, how would I feel if I didn't have the thought?

Your mistake was not in imagining things you could not know—that is, after all, what imagination is for. Rather, your mistake was in unthinkingly treating what you imagined as though it were an accurate representation of the facts.

the future is fundamentally different than it appears through the prospectiscope.

But as bald men with cheap hairpieces always seem to forget, acting as though you have something and actually having it are not the same thing, and anyone who looks closely can tell the difference.

Emotional intelligence does not mean merely "being nice". At strategic moment it may demand not "being nice", but rather, for example, bluntly confronting someone with an uncomfortable but consequential truth they've been avoiding.

Being honest about the existence of a small blemish can enhance your offering's true beauty.