Quotes About Truth

The result is of unique historical importance despite the Archivist's decision to leave in blatant falsehoods, self-serving allegations, and many amoral anecdotes not suitable for young persons.

My little Marochka speaks the truth of her heart, as she must. As must every Rasputin. And indeed as must every person.

The most important truths always appear first as blasphemies or obscenities. That's why every great innovator is persecuted. And the sacraments look obscene, too, to an outsider. The eucharist is just sublimated cannibalism, to the unawakened. When the Pope kisses the feet of the laity, he looks like an old toe-queen to some people. The rites of Pan look like a suburban orgy.

Humans live through their myths and only endure their realities.

Relativity and quantum mechanics have demonstrated clearly that what you find out with instruments is true relative only to the instrument you're using, and where that instrument is located in space-time. So there is no vantage point from which 'real' reality can be seen; we're all looking from the point of view of our own reality tunnels.

I can summarize my thoughts now by simply saying each must find his or her own Way because the way does not exist.

There is no complete theory of anything.

Thus, we can name our two heads — we have a real head outside the perceived universe and a perceived head inside the perceived universe, and our real head now appears, not only much bigger than our perceived head, but bigger than our perceived universe.

Back in the 1950s, mathematician Anatole Rapoport offered a four-valued logic which I often find useful, classifying statements as true, false, indeterminate (at this date) and meaningless (forever indeterminate, because no experience can either prove them or refute them.)

From the Sufi: Mullah Nasrudin once entered a store and asked the proprietor, "Have you ever seen me before?" "No," was the prompt answer. "Then," cried Nasrudin, "how do you know it is me?

The Buddhist says: the mountains are real. The mountains are not real. The mountains are both real and not-real. The mountains are neither real nor not-real.

The fruit is orange, to ordinary perception. The fruit is not orange, to Galileo's analysis. The fruit is both orange and not-orange, to those who recognize that the existential and the scientific grids each have a kind of validity. The fruit is neither orange nor not-orange, to those who recognize that all grids are human inventions.

As Charlie Chaplin said once in a morbid context, Numbers sanctify. The more I pile up such monstrosities, the more likely it is that some readers will start to believe them.

And when I tell the story that way I remember, alas, that space-time events do not come before us flaunting labels that say FACT or APPEARANCE — that we make that judgment, every second, and thus create our emic or existential reality — and that this is not just true of lesser mortals like you and me but of the High Priests themselves, maybe even including the High Priests of the New Inquisition —

As Paul Watzlawick notes, that which is objectively repressed (unspeakable) soon becomes subjectively repressed (unthinkable). Nobody likes to feel like a coward and a liar constantly. It is easier to cease to notice where the official tunnel-reality differs from existential fact. Thus SNAFU accelerates and rigiditus bureaucraticus sets in — the last stage before all brain activity ceases and the pyramid is clinically dead as an intellectual entity.

ETIC REALITY: the hypothetical actuality that has not been filtered through the emic reality of a human nervous system or linguistic grid. If you have anything to say about Etic Reality without using words or any other symbols, please send a full description of it to the author at once.

Please remember that Dr. Mermin's position differs from my claim, which holds that the moon does not appear in our observed universe until somebody looks, but I do not assert we can make meaningful assertions about either existence or non-existence in the real universe and can only make meaningful utterances after somebody looks at the observed universe.

I suggest, following some ideas in semantics and modern logic, that Marilyn Monroe was the most beautiful woman of her time should be considered a self-referential statement. That is, it refers to the nervous system of the speaker. Properly, it should be phrased as Marilyn Monroe seemed the most beautiful woman of her time to me. Stated thusly, it is true (unless we want to be so tricky as to assume the speaker is deliberately deceiving us).

I feel great and I send fraternal greetings to Dr. Andrei Sakharov in Russia," said Dr. Leary on emerging from prison, registering the fact that the mechanisms of the police state are the same everywhere, as are the myths that protect them. "Good Russians" believed Dr. Sakharov was a half-crazed alcoholic, just as "Good Americans" believed Dr. Leary was a half-crazed dope-fiend.

Such self-referential truths are valid for only one person at a time, or one group of persons, and do not refer to anything but the nervous system or nervous systems of those who espouse them. This does not mean that they are false, but only that they are even more relative (and subjective) than legal proofs, for instance, and that they are very, very different from scientific or mathematical truths.

If perception is not absolute, no deduction from perception can be absolute. No matter how ingeniously one juggles with approximations, they do not magically turn into certainties; at best, they become the most accurate possible approximations.

My basic attitude has always been that the greatest drug any chemist could possibly invent would be an anti-gullibility pill, to cure humanity of its addiction to faith and dogma.

A popular fallacy holds that there are no non-objective realities: that objective reality is the "only" reality. The error of this view can clearly be seen when one contemplates the range of non-objective realities encountered and endured by different people on ordinary days, without any occult operations being performed at all:

Once you have given up asking "what day is it?" you will soon find it easy to give up asking what anything really "is." Then, in Melville's fine phrase, you can strike through the mask — pierce the veil of cultural conditioning (emic tunnel-reality) and see and hear with your own eyes and ears. In the words of a great poet, Don't believe the human eye In sunlight or in shade: The shadow-show of sight and sense Is the Devil's masquerade.