Quotes About Truth

Only the fakes survive.

It's a repressive society where you can't be horrible, I'm not horrible, they made me horrible, I'm just honest.

Any kind of history you read is basically the winning side telling you the others were bad.

Newspapers reported on the disease with the same mixture of truth and half-truth, truth and distortion, truth and lies with which they reported everything else. And no national official ever publicly acknowledged the danger of influenza.

The federal government was giving no guidance that a reasoning person could credit. Few local governments did better. They left a vacuum. Fear filled it. The government's very efforts to preserve "morale" fostered the fear, for since the war began, morale—defined in the narrowest, most shortsighted fashion—had taken precedence in every public utterance. As California senator Hiram Johnson said in 1917, "The first casualty when war comes is truth.

There are limits to such manipulation. Even under torture, nature will not lie, will not yield a consistent, reproducible result, unless it is true. But if tortured enough, nature will mislead; it will confess to something that is true only under special conditions—the conditions the investigator created in the laboratory. Its truth is then artificial, an experimental artifact.

if it believes that it knows the truth and that it need not question its beliefs, then that society is more likely to enforce rigid decrees, and less likely to change. If it leaves room for doubt about the truth, it is more likely to be free and open. In

Truth and falsehood are arbitrary terms. . . . There is nothing in experience to tell us that one is always preferable to the other. . . . There are lifeless truths and vital lies. . . . The force of an idea lies in its inspirational value. It matters very little if it is true or false.

Part of that relationship requires political leaders to understand the truth—and to be able to handle the truth.

The force of an idea lies in its inspirational value. It matters very little if it is true or false.

For if there is a single dominant lesson from 1918, it's that governments need to tell the truth in a crisis.

In 1918 the lies of officials and of the press never allowed the terror to condense into the concrete. The public could trust nothing and so they knew nothing.

Despite that effort, whoever held power, whether a city government or some private gathering of the locals, they generally failed to keep the community together. They failed because they lost trust. They lost trust because they lied. (San Francisco was a rare exception; its leaders told the truth, and the city responded heroically.) And they lied for the war effort, for the propaganda machine that Wilson had created.

The foundation of morality is to have done, once and for all, with lying." A brilliant scientist, later president of the Royal Society, he advised investigators, "Sit down before a fact as a little child, be prepared to give up every preconceived notion. Follow humbly wherever and to whatever abysses nature leads, or you shall learn nothing." He also believed that learning had purpose, stating, "The great end of life is not knowledge but action.

So the problems presented by a pandemic are, obviously, immense. But the biggest problem lies in the relationship between governments and the truth.

For if there is a single dominant lesson from 1918, it's that governments need to tell the truth in a crisis. Risk communication implies managing the truth. You don't manage the truth. You tell the truth.

Jacob Henle, the first scientist to formulate the modern germ theory, echoed Francis Bacon when he said, "Nature answers only when she is questioned.

problems presented by a pandemic are, obviously, immense. But the biggest problem lies in the relationship between governments and the truth. • • • Part of that relationship requires political leaders to understand the truth—and to be able to handle the truth. If there's a lesson from the 2009 pandemic, it's that too many governments were incapable of doing so.

risk communication." I don't much care for the term. For if there is a single dominant lesson from 1918, it's that governments need to tell the truth in a crisis. Risk communication implies managing the truth. You don't manage the truth. You tell the truth.

In 1918 the lies of officials and of the press never allowed the terror to condense into the concrete. The public could trust nothing and so they knew nothing. Society is, ultimately, based on trust; as trust broke down, people became alienated not only from those in authority, but from each other.

Risk communication implies managing the truth. You don't manage the truth. You tell the truth.

As California senator Hiram Johnson said in 1917, "The first casualty when war comes is truth.

This answer involves not simply academic pursuits; it affects how a society governs itself, its structure, how its citizens live. If a society does set Goethe's "Word . . . supremely high," if it believes that it knows the truth and that it need not question its beliefs, then that society is more likely to enforce rigid decrees, and less likely to change. If it leaves room for doubt about the truth, it is more likely to be free and

Google's acquisition of an R & D company closely linked to the military instigated a round of speculation. Many suggested that Google, having bought a military robotics firm, might become a weapons maker. Nothing could have been further from the truth. In his discussions with the technologists at the companies he was acquiring, Rubin sketched out a vision of robots that would safely complete tasks performed by delivery workers at UPS and FedEx.