Quotes About Truth

Balzac's semiotics is all about detection, the need to discover who people really are.

Trotski describió en una ocasión a los perdedores como los consignados «al cubo de la basura de la historia» y no es un dato desdeñable que las ediciones sucesivas de la Bolshaya sovietskaya entsiklopediya (Gran Enciclopedia soviética) omitiera a personas, ideas y cosas que el Partido Comunista consideraba políticamente incorrectas, especialmente Trotski después de su ruptura con Stalin.

I knew my mother was right, but that didn't change the way I felt about things. People always think that if they can prove they're right, you'll change your mind.

Most people think things are not real unless they are spoken, that it's the uttering of something, not the thinking of it, that legitimizes it. I suppose this is why people always want other people to say "I love you." I think just the opposite—that thoughts are realest when thought, that expressing them distorts or dilutes them.

So," he said, after he had taken a bite "you're not going to tell me?" "Not going to tell you what?" "Whether or not you're gay." "No," I said. "Why should I? Did you tell your parents?" "I wasn't gay," said my father. "I was straight." "So, what, if you're gay you have a moral obligation to inform your parents and if you're straight you don't?

Journalists are poorly paid and often alarmingly unconcerned about sources or facts, whilst many articles are an infuriating mixture of fact and comment.

Everything I've ever told you, including this, is a lie.

Today, citizens were at once less trusting and more credulous. Many had swallowed lies of vast proportion.

It matters not how it seems. All that matters is what is, and I will simply have to deal with whatever that happens to be.

Confession is good for the soul only in the sense that a tweed coat is good for dandruff -- it is a palliative rather than a remedy.

You believe what you must in order to stave off the conviction that it's all a tale told by an idiot

It's not the pain that hurts,' she said, 'it's finding out that one of your idols is a real asshole.

For Christians, then, the question is not "Who gets the Bible right?" The question is and has always been, "Who gets Jesus right?" The Gospel writers and Paul couldn't have made that any clearer.

For any one group today to think it has the best grasp on the creator of the universe is a form of insanity. Run away—far and quickly—when you see this.

Ours is a historical faith, and to uproot the Bible from its historical contexts is self-contradictory.

If we let the Bible be the Bible, on its own terms—on God's terms—we will see this in-fleshing God at work, not despite the challenges, the unevenness, and ancient strangeness of the Bible, but precisely because of these things. Perhaps not the way we would have written our sacred book, if we had been consulted, but the one that the good and wise God has allowed his people to have.

When you read the Bible on its own terms, you discover that it doesn't behave itself like a holy rulebook should.

Readers who come to the Bible expecting something more like an accurate textbook, a more-or-less objective recalling of the past—because, surely, God wouldn't have it any other way—are in for an uncomfortable read. But if they take seriously the words in front of them, they will quickly find that the Bible doesn't deliver on that expectation. Not remotely.

As Jesus, the Word, is of divine origin as well as a thoroughly human figure of first-century Palestine, so is the Bible of ultimately divine origin yet also thoroughly a product of its time.

When knowing what you believe is the nonnegotiable center of true faith, questions and critical self-examination pose a threat.

getting the Bible right and getting Jesus right are not the same thing.

All attempts to put the past into words are interpretations of the past, not "straight history." There is no such thing. Anywhere. Including the Bible.

I think of Christians who, having been raised to read the Genesis creation story as literal science and history, leave for college, watch the History Channel, or log onto the internet, and find out that fossils and radiometric dating are in fact not hoaxes. That's how nice Christian college freshmen become atheists by Christmas break. If your faith can unravel that quickly, it's enough to make you question whether your faith is worth the effort at all.

So much can be learned from other traditions. In the long history of the Christian church, so many different, even conflicting, points of view have been embraced as true and valuable.