Quotes About Truth

In economics, "The Marxist model seems better to me than the Monetarist model" states a fact (about the nervous system of the speaker, if I must make the obvious even more obvious.) "Marx is true and the Monetarists are refuted" states an opinion disguised as a fact. The former encourages intelligent discussion; the latter virtually incites emotional conflict.

I deduce that everybody tends to believe the clock, or alleged clock, that fits his own reality-tunnel.

Maybe the world is like a cock-eyed room, and when we cannot believe what we see, we see what we can believe, choosing among hallucinations.

She began to think of TVland as, not just a condensed electronic image or ghost of Reality, but a mask that had undergone considerable editing and rewriting to suit those in charge of Reality Selection for the whole society in which the TV existed. She realized that what the TV showed did not represent a simple Xerox of the Real World but a complicated social "game" — or tacit conspiracy — to pretend a certain set of programs contained all of the Real World.

It was mass hallucination. It was not mass hallucination. It was both mass hallucination and not mass hallucination. It was neither mass hallucination nor not mass hallucination.

Yes, it was mass hallucination. No, it was not mass hallucination. Maybe it was mass hallucination.

How do you get free of the damnable books of Romance when everybody else is still living in them?

2Nor does an iron bar possess the essence of hardness. It merely seems hard to humans, but might seem comparatively soft or pliable to a muscular 500-pound gorilla. ~•~

Whatever you say it is, it isn't," Korzybski, the semanticist, repeated endlessly in his seminars, trying to make clear that third-circuit semantic maps are not the territories they represent; that we can always make maps of our maps, revisions of our revisions, meta-selves of our selves.

The great Soviet film director, Sergei Eisenstein, once wrote an essay claiming the camera is a liar. What did he mean by that? An old Zen Buddhist riddle asks Who is the Master who makes the grass green?

But, after the unmasked or naked vision of Ishtar—the world experienced as infinitely more than all masks — we can never take any one mask (or any one pookah) as seriously as its Idolators. We can see many kinds of truth in many kinds of masks, and we can see the fallacies in all of them — chiefly, the fallacies of allness (the mask includes all) and Identification (the mask "is" all.)

And I repeat that we might all become startlingly sane, or at least much less stupid, if we tried, even occasionally, to look dispassionately and without prejudice at precisely those events which do not seem to fit our own favorite reality-tunnel or tunnels.

Medieval Idolatry consisted of metaphors that were called Revealed Truth. Modern Idolatry consists of metaphors that are called Objective Truth. In both cases human linguistic structures — complicated primate chatterings — have, in effect, become Gods, and whoever questions them is considered a blasphemer and the priests seek to destroy the impiety. That's how books get burned, in Florence in 1300 (or in New York in 1956, as we shall see).

If you believe in it, you can almost see it. Or, at least, you can convince yourself that anything else is mere appearance or hallucination.

Transactional Psychology, based largely on the pioneering research concerning human perception conducted at Princeton University in the 1940s by Albert Ames, agrees with all the above systems that we cannot know any abstract Truth but only relative truths (small t, plural) derived from our gambles as our brain makes models of the ocean of new signals it receives every second.

This is what scientists call a pragmatic statement. That is, it is not truth as known to the theoretician or the pure scientist in the ivory tower; it is a generalization useful to the troubleshooter dealing with actual events in the laboratory. (In this case, of course, the laboratory is the human head.)

If Nietzsche's existential relativism be accepted, then there will always be true things that do not fit any existing reality-tunnel, just as in mathematics Godel demonstrated that there will always be true theorems not deducible from any set of axioms. (See Chapter Two.)

Every reality-tunnel is real to those who experience it, and none are real in the old sense of existing apart from us in a platonic Absoluteness.

It is possible that truth only exists when one has already specified the context or field within which one is speaking.

When mystics etc. talk about ordinary consciousness as sleep, dream, illusion, etc., are they talking about something very esoteric that only other mystics can understand? Or are they talking about the extent to which normal consciousness (mechanical consciousness in my sense) relates to fictitious predicates attached to groups and ignores (does not perceive) person1, person2, etc.?

The Word was made flesh." Divine Truth must be known by its effects on the body as well as on the mind.

All appearances seem to be facts, at first, to those to whom they appear.

A fact allegedly exists; a non-fact allegedly doesn't exist. But existence is something we can never know all about. It is a term in metaphysics, not in operational science.

We never find out how many of the people "framed" by Quinlan actually committed the crimes for which he framed them — just as we never find out the definite position of a quantum particle, or how many Picassos we should really call Elmyrs. Post-modernism does not result from whim, but from growing evidence that we simply do not live in an Aristotelian true/false universe. As UMMO says, we live with a middle (or muddle) excluded by Aristotle.