Quotes About Truth

Voltaire said about God that 'there is no God, but don't tell that to my servant, lest he murder me at night'.

since there is only one real world, whereas the number of potential virtual worlds is infinite, the probability that you happen to inhabit the sole real world is almost zero.

how does a fascist decide what to teach kids in school? He uses the same yardstick. Teach the kids whatever serves the interests of the nation; the truth does not matter.

This is the deep reason secular people cherish scientific truth: not in order to satisfy their curiosity, but in order to know how best to reduce the suffering in the world.

The truth is that truth was never high on the agenda of Homo sapiens.

If you really want truth, you need to escape the black hole of power, and allow yourself to waste a lot of time wandering here and there on the periphery. Revolutionary knowledge rarely makes it to the centre, because the centre is built on existing knowledge.

the realest thing in the world is suffering.

there are so many contradictory accounts that it is hard to know what to believe.

We cannot search for the truth and for the way out of suffering without the freedom to think, investigate, and experiment

If you believe in an absolute truth revealed by a transcendent power, you cannot allow yourself to admit any error, for that would nullify your whole story. But if you believe in a quest for truth by fallible humans, admitting blunders is part of the game.

As a species, humans prefer power to truth.

History isn't a single narrative, but thousands of alternative narratives. Whenever we choose to tell one, we are also choosing to silence others.

Homo sapiens is a post-truth species, whose power depends on creating and believing fictions.

Some fake news lasts forever.

Perhaps the deeper meaning of this commandment is that we should never use the name of God for political interests, economic ambitions, or our personal hatreds. People hate somebody and say "God hates him." People covet a piece of land and say "God wants it." The world would be a better place if we followed the third commandment more devotedly. You want to wage war on your neighbors and steal their land? Leave God out of it and find yourself some other excuse.

We believe in a particular order not because it is objectively true, but because believing in it enables us to cooperate effectively and forge a better society. Imagined orders are not evil conspiracies or useless mirages. Rather, they are the only way large numbers of humans can cooperate effectively.

In the twenty-first century censorship works by flooding people with irrelevant information.

People are afraid of being trapped inside a box, but they don't realize that they are already trapped inside a box—their brain—which is locked within the bigger box of human society with its myriad fictions.

When you escape the matrix the only thing you discover is a bigger matrix.

When everybody uses the same oracle, and everybody believes the oracle, the oracle turns into a sovereign.

The problem with evil is that in real life it is not necessarily ugly. It can look very beautiful.

A lie told once remains a lie, but a lie told a thousand times becomes the truth.

truth" is defined by the top results of the Google search.

Anyone who has ever dealt with the tax authorities, the education system or any other complex bureaucracy knows that the truth hardly matters. What's written on your form is far more important.