Quotes About Truth

We must never forget that art is not a form of propaganda; it is a form of truth.

The one unchangeable certainty is that nothing is certain or unchangeable.

A nation that is afraid to let its people judge the truth and falsehood in an open market is a nation that is afraid of its people.

And so it is to the printing press--to the recorder of man's deeds, the keeper of his conscience, the courier of his news--that we look for strength and assistance, confident that with your help man will be what he was born to be: free and independent.

When power corrupts, poetry cleanses.

They follow the Hitler line - no matter how big the lie; repeat it often enough and the masses will regard it as the truth.

Truth is a tyrant-the only tyrant to whom we can give our allegiance. The service of truth is a matter of heroism.

The highest duty of the writer is to remain true to himself and let the chips fall where they may. In serving his vision of the truth the artist best serves his nation.

The great enemy of the truth is very often not the lie — deliberate, contrived and dishonest — but the myth — persistent, persuasive, and unrealistic.

there are few if any issues where all the truth and all the right and all the angels are on one side.

For the great enemy of truth is very often not the lie--deliberate, contrived, and dishonest--but the myth--persistent, persuasive, and unrealistic.

If art is to nourish the roots of our culture, society must set the artist free to follow his vision wherever it takes him. We must never forget that art is not a form of propaganda; it is a form of truth.

Truth is omnipotent.

When power corrupts, poetry cleanses. For art establishes the basic human truth which must serve as the touchstone of our judgment.

When the Word of God has spoken clearly and plainly, the unbelief of men, the reasonings of the natural mind and the wisdom of the world can be safely disregarded.

They are, mostly, sane people who are telling their story truthfully.

Philosophers, Wittgenstein said, had made the mistake of being like scientists chasing the meaning behind things – truth, mind, time, justice, reality – when none of this really matters, or is even achievable. A philosopher might waste his time wondering how he knew the child with the cut knee screaming her head off was really in pain, while the mother would rush in with comfort and bandages. The philosopher was clearly the one with lessons to learn.

We are all in flight from the real reality. That is the basic definition of Homo Sapiens.

Do you know that every great thing in the history of art and every beautiful thing in life is actually what you call nasty or has been caused by feelings that you would call nasty? By passion, by love, by hatred, by truth. Do you know that?

One of the great fallacies of our time is that the Nazis rose to power because they imposed order on chaos. Precisely the opposite is true - they were successful because they imposed chaos on order. They tore up the commandments, they denied the super-ego, what you will. They said, You may persecute the minority, you may kill, you may torture, you may couple and breed without love. They offered humanity all its great temptations. Nothing is true, everything is permitted.

People won't admit it, they're too busy grabbing to see that the lights have fused. They can't see the darkness and the spider-face beyond and the great web of it all. That there's always this if you scratch at the surface of happiness and goodness. The black and the black and the black.

You do not even think of your own past as quite real; you dress it up, you gild it or blacken it, censor it, tinker with it ... fictionalize it, in a word, and put it away on a shelf - your book, your romanced autobiography. We are all in flight from the real reality. That is a basic definition of Homo sapiens.

The silence was terrible then, as tense as a bridge about to break, a tower to fall; unedurable in its emotion, its truth bursting to be spoken.

Why should I struggle through hundreds of pages of fabrication to reach half a dozen very little truths?' 'For fun?' 'Fun!' He pounced on the word. 'Words are for truth. For facts. Not fiction.