Quotes About Truth

With that as my guiding question, I set out on what became a lengthy journey through the vast and tangled forest of Churchill scholarship, a realm of giant volumes, distorted facts, and bizarre conspiracy theories, to try to find my personal Churchill. As I've discovered with prior books, when you look at the past through a fresh lens, you invariably see the world differently and find new material and insights even along well-trodden paths.

Who do you become when you've lost sight of who you are but the false you isn't one you can pretend to be anymore?

No. Just stating facts. You and me? Inevitable.

There are some things you just can't cover up.

Believe me, Paul, when you're in a jam the truth is the only thing solid enough and substantial enough to rely on.

Don't ever fool yourself that facts don't fit, if you get the right explanation. They're just like jigsaw puzzles—when you get them right, they're all going to fit together.

Once a man forms an opinion, he starts interpreting facts in the light of that belief. He ceases to be an impartial judge of facts.

Erle Stanley Gardner

There are no ethics when you're dealing with the police. Or I should say when the police are dealing with you. You're supposed to be bound by ethics. The police don't have ethics. They act on the assumption that they're 'getting the truth,' whereas you are 'protecting a criminal

The world of human aspiration is largely fictitious and if we do not understand this we understand nothing about man.

Man] literally drives himself into a blind obliviousness with social games, psychological tricks, personal preoccupations so far removed from the reality of his situation that they are forms of madness, but madness all the same.

Man is an animal who has to live in a lie in order to live at all.

For centuries man lived in the belief that truth was slim and elusive and that once he found it the troubles of mankind would be over. And here we are in the closing decades of the 20th century, choking on truth.

The real world is simply too terrible to admit; it tells man that he is a small, trembling animal who will decay and die.

With the truth, one cannot live. To be able to live one needs illusions, not only outer illusions such as art, religion, philosophy, science and love afford, but inner illusions which first condition the outer

the neurotic symptom is a communication about truth: that the illusion that one is invulnerable is a lie.

Why are groups so blind and stupid?" men have always asked. "Because they demand illusions," answered Freud. They constantly give what is unreal precedence over what is real. And we know why. The real world is simply too terrible to admit. It tells man that he is a small, trembling animal who will decay and die. Illusion changes all of this, makes man seem important, vital to the universe, immortal in some way.

And here we are in the closing decades of the 20th century, choking on truth. There has been so much brilliant writing, so many genial discoveries, so vast an extension and elaboration of these discoveries—yet the mind is silent as the world spins on its age-old demonic career.

I think that taking life seriously means something such as this: that whatever man does on this planet has to be done in the lived truth of the terror of creation, of the grotesque, of the rumble of panic underneath everything. Otherwise it is false.

Anxiety is the result of the perception of the truth of one's condition. What does it mean to be self-conscious animal? The idea is ludicrous, if it is not monstrous. It means to know that one is food for worms. This is the terror: to have emerged from nothing, to have a name, consciousness of self, deep inner feelings, an excruciating inner yearning for life and self-expression--and with all this yet to die.

man can never securely know what absolute reality is.

never has there been an age in which so little knowledge is securely possessed, so little a part of the common understanding.

Even in our passions we are nursery children playing with toys that represent the real world. Even when these toys crash and cost us our lives or our sanity, we are cheated of the consolation that we were in the real world instead of the playpen of our fantasies.

Becker has never found a mass audience is because he shames us with the knowledge of how easily we will shed blood to purchase the assurance of our own righteousness.