Quotes About Truth

I like a puzzle, as you know. So does every scholar worth his salt. It's the reward of the business, to look history in the eye and say, 'I know who you are. You can't fool me.

No I like a puzzle, as you know. So does every scholar worth his salt. It's the reward of the business, to look history in the eye and say, 'I know who you are. You can't fool me.

At first I thought I would study literature. Then, however, I realised I loved true stories even better than imaginary ones.

It's the reward of the business, to look history in the eye and say, 'I know who you are. You can't fool me.

So much of what we do each day is a diversion from what our lives are really about. A traumatic event is like a knife slicing through our diversionary tactics and exposing the vein of truth—the truth of what we really want, of how we really feel, of the wrongs we have visited upon each other, of the love we crave from each other.

Politics isn't about reality, it's about what you can make people believe is real.

And unofficially?

The world wasn't going to go away. Ever.

My memories are not books. They are only stories that I have been over so many times in my head that I don't know from one day to the next what's remembered and what's made up. Like when you memorize a poem, and for one small unimportant part you supply your own words. The meaning's the same, the meter's identical. When you read the actual version you can never get it into your head that it's right and you're wrong.

Should I tell you the truth I know, or try to guess the untruth you want?

The man who had spread those rumors first had been a sociopath, a clever criminal—why, now that everyone knew about him, did they still believe his lies?

What someone believes another person thinks is often wrong. That's why the law—our system of law—relies on the closest thing we can get to a fact: observed behavior, acts, and words.

I'm not saying Barra's bad, exactly, but I am saying you think she's good at heart because you like her and want her to be good at heart. It doesn't work that way. If you don't learn to see people as they are, you'll get hurt someday.

They're called cliches because they're true, you know. Besides, life is quite complicated enough...

You know how your eyes can deceive you at times--how a group of shapes and shadows can take on a certain form and then shift into another? It wasn't really like that; there was no physical change in him, he was exactly the same as he'd always been. I knew every line of his long body and every curl on his disheveled black head. I'd just never seen him before. you know what I'm trying to say, don't you? The change is in the heart.

It is setting a high value upon our opinions to roast men alive on account of them.' Nobody ever said a truer word.

Reputable scholars might have denied its authenticity, but there are always other scholars who disagree--and people will believe what they want to believe, never mind the evidence. If there is anything life has taught me, it is that there is no idea so absurd that someone will not accept it as truth, and no action so bizarre that it will not be justified in the eyes of a true believer.

I have sometimes been sad that Tennessee Williams wrote that line for Blanche DuBois, I have always depended on the kindness of strangers. Many of us have been saved many times by the kindness of strangers, but after a while it sounds trite, like a bumper sticker. And that's what makes me sad, that a beautiful and true line comes to be used so often that it takes on the superficial sound of a bumper sticker.

One went on and on, never dreaming of the sudden dreadful day when the coverings were going to be dropped and one would see it was death after all, that it had been death all the time, death pretending, death waiting

The less a person knows, the more certain he is that he is right, and ... no weapons yet invented are of any use in a struggle with stupidity.

Put out? My dear Gertrud, I have been thinking of very serious things. You cannot expect me to frolic along paths of thought that lead to mighty and unpleasant truths. Why should I always smile? I am not a Cheshire cat.

and just loving him with all her simple young heart and entirely believing in him, had made him, so completely commonplace before in all his utterances, suddenly—at least in the pulpit—sing. Was it acute, personal experience that one needed? Did one only cry out the truth really movingly when under some sort of lash, either of grief or ecstasy?

I also learned an essential truth: When you have no real power, go public—really public. The public is where the real power is.

this man was even more divisive and dishonest than his presidential campaign revealed.