Quotes About Truth

Discretion is not the better part of biography.

Torture is a good way to get people to talk but a poor method of finding out the truth; people confess whether there is any reality to the confession or not. -Symphony for the City of the Dead: Dmitri Shostakovich and the Siege of Leningrad

When asked, 'What did you want to say in this work?' he would answer, 'I've said what I've said.' This made sense in where everyone assumed music had a meaning - but where saying the wrong thing could get a person killed. -Symphony for the City of the Dead: Dmitri Shostakovich and the Siege of Leningrad

When we read tales of atrocity, we all want to be the one who stood firm, who would not bend, who shouted the truth in the face of the dictator. Vsevolod Meyerhold came as close as anyone to achieving this. It is important to know of the full horror of his sacrifice. It is easy for all to imagine we are heroes when we are sitting in our kitchens, dreaming of distant suffering. - Symphony for the City of the Dead: Dmitri Shostakovich and the Siege of Leningrad

In a regime where words are watched, lies are rewarded, and silence is survival, there is no truth. - Symphony for the City of the Dead: Dmitri Shostakovich and the Siege of Leningrad

if we let it speak to us rather than squeezing it into our self-created mold. Even God can be known truly, though not absolutely.[54] As Athanasius observed, God can be apprehended but not comprehended;

Perception of a state is not the state.

After all why should our goal be the reinstatement of an illusory 'exact' relationship between events and words? If you probe in the ashes you will never learn anything about the fire: by the time the ashes can be handled the meaning has passed on. Every adventure is a cup so empty it can be drunk from again and again and again. Every adventure is so perfect it verges on silence.

I'm not a leftist; I'm where the righteous ought to be.

The point was that you have to look at the world as it is, not as some elegant theory says it ought to be.

To me, coming from applied mathematics, a theorem was a statement about an everlasting mathematical truth—not the dressing up of a trivial observation in a lot of formalism.

Wasn't that the terrible lesson of her life? Who can ever really know anyone?

It may not always be easy, convenient or politically correct to stand for truth and right, but it is the right thing to do. Always.

The denial of suffering is, in fact a better definition of illness than its acceptance.

Mental health increases as we pursue reality at all cost.

Human beings are poor examiners, subject to superstition, bias, prejudice, and a PROFOUND tendency to see what they want to see rather than what is really there.

And then, this she offered to me, my one truth: "Our language," she said, "is not spoken, but sung.... Not simply words... and grammar... but melody. It was hard... thus... to learn English... this language of wood. For the people of your nation, Octavian, all speech is song.

We can trust no one. In a regime where words are watched, lies are rewarded, and silence is survival, there is no truth.

A fictional character living in a nonfiction world.

could be stretching the truth

opposed to behind closed doors. Their psychology. The way they both believed that as long as they told a lie long enough, to as

The way they both believed that as long as they told a lie long enough, to as many people as possible, that it should be believed because they said it. Community

The gut speaks—and rarely lies—of what is and what is to come.

Maybe having a sex was like clothing, something to be donned over the deeper truth of being human.