Quotes About Truth

We live in the time where we have fictitious election results that elects a fictitious president. We live in a time where we have a man sending us to war for fictitious reasons.

You can walk through the grocery store and, while the brightly colored packaging and empty promises are still mesmerizing, you can see the products for what they are.

During his hajj, Malcolm [Malcolm X] fell into a new Islam with the same blind faith that he had given to Elijah. Since he lived just a year after his hajj, Mecca became the neatly presented and cinema-friendly conclusion to his lifelong thread of transformations: but he finally found the Truth and then Allah took him home. But if he lived longer, I think he would have called out the Arabs.

In the last few years, the very idea of telling the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth is dredged up only as a final resort when the alternative options of deception, threat and bribery have all been exhausted.

experience convinces me that no permanent good can come out of untruth and violence.

Non-violence is the law of our being, as violence is of the brute. Non-violence is the law of the human race and is infinitely greater than and superior to brute force, Not violence, not untruth, but non-violence and truth are the law of our being.

At a wat temple in the mountains of Northern Thailand, a Buddhist teacher once reminded me of a simple truth. "Life," he said, "is offered as a means of self-expression, only giving us what we seek when we listen to the heart." The highest forms of this expression are acts of kindness.

Neither the truth nor the character of history depend, in any way, upon its having some lesson to teach us. And if ever we persuade ourselves that the past has taught us something, we may be certain that it is not the historical past which has been our teacher.

The very efficacy of opinion manipulation rests on the fact that we do not know we are being manipulated. The most insidious forms of oppression are those that so insinuate themselves into our communication universe and the recesses of our minds that we do not even realize they are acting upon us. The most powerful ideologies are not those that prevail against all challengers but those that are never challenged because in their ubiquity they appear as nothing more than the unadorned truth.

Whoever he said he was, thought Marsh, he was not from the immigration department, and the web that he was convinced Walsh had been weaving was beginning to unravel with disastrous and dangerous consequences.

In the end, it wasn't so much that there was an alternative narrative--there always was--but it came down to belief: Which one did you want to believe. Which one suited you best? Or, perhaps more to the point: Which one told the story you were already telling yourself?

A common caricature of Catholic teaching is that it rejects the notion of salvation by grace and affirms instead that salvation is simply by works. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Life is all about detecting and then avoiding bullshit.

If originality and truth are your aim, cultivate your own back garden.

Only in promotional brochures was Los Angeles the City of Angels. To those who knew it, really knew it, it was not a city, but a vast, open grave swallowing up young lives.

Truth is beautiful and divine no matter how humble its origin.

Truth is a matter of semantics, whether we like it or not.

Do you believe in God?" he asks. "Do you?" "I used to" "What happened?" "I couldn't find him. He's supposed to be everywhere. I mean, he's not supposed to be playing hide-and-seek.

It was the most important moment in human history, the telling of the first lie. That's what separates us from the other animals. It has nothing to do with humans thinking on a higher plane or having easily available credit. We lie to each other. We deliberately mislead.

To misquote Mark Twain: It isn't what we don't know that gets us into trouble. It's what we know for sure that just isn't so.

Anyone who says honesty is the best policy is living in la-la land. Either that or they have never been married or had children. Parents lie to their kids all the time--about sex, drugs, death, and a hundred other things. We lie to those we love to protect their feelings. We lie because that's what love means, whereas unfettered honesty is cruel and the height of self-indulgence.

It's showing Fox News—fair and balanced for those who like falling over.

The truth is rarely pure and never simple. Oscar Wilde

For a man with no cows you talk a lot of bullshit, Ryan.