Quotes About Truth

Responsibility rests upon recognition, and recognition is a form of agreement.

My God, boy! You're black and living in the South—did you forget how to lie?

For history records the patterns of men's lives, they say: Who slept with whom and with what results; who fought and who won and who lived to lie about it afterwards.

I was never more hated than when I tried to be honest. Or when, even as just now I've tried to articulate exactly what I felt to be the truth. No one was satisfied, not even I. I've never been more loved than when I tried to 'justify' and affirm someone's mistaken beliefs.

I was never more hated than when I tried to be honest.

But not quite, for actually it is only the known, the seen, the heard and only those events that the recorder regards as important that are put down, those lies his keepers keep their power by.

Play the game, but don't believe in it—that much you owe yourself.

These white folk have newspapers, magazines, radios, spokesmen to get their ideas across. If they want to tell the world a lie, they can tell it so well that it becomes the truth;

That which we do is what we are. That which we remember is, more often than not, that which we would like to have been; or that which we hope to be. Thus our memory and our identity are ever at odds; our history ever a tall tale told by inattentive idealists.

Well, few men love the truth or even regard facts so dearly as to let either one upset their picture of the world.

It's "winner take nothing" that is the great truth of our country or of any country. Life is to be lived, not controlled; and humanity is won by continuing to play in face of certain defeat.

Perhaps the truth was always a lie.

Toata viata am cautat ceva si, oriunde m-as fi indreptat, cineva incerca sa-mi spuna ce este acel ceva. Am acceptat raspunsurile fiecaruia, desi erau deseori contradictorii unele fata de altele sau chiar fata de ele insele. Am fost naiv. Ma cautam pe mine insumi si intrebam pe oricine, mai putin pe mine, intrebari la care eu, si numai eu, puteam gasi raspunsul.

HARRY: I tell you, it is not me you are looking at, Not me you are grinning at, not me your confidential looks Incriminate, but that other person, if person, You thought I was: let your necrophily Feed upon that carcase.… T. S. Eliot, Family Reunion

I was never more hated than when I tried to be honest. Or when, even as just now I've tried to articulate exactly what I felt to be the truth. No one was satisfied—not even I. On the other hand, I've never been more loved and appreciated than when I tried to "justify" and affirm someone's mistaken beliefs; or when I've tried to give my friends the incorrect, absurd answers they wished to hear.

Maybe it's just that some of us have had certain facts and truths slapped up against our heads so hard and so often that we have to see them and pay our respects to their reality.

Whenever a clamor is raised, and idle men get to work, it is highly necessary to examine facts carefully, and without unreasonably suspecting men of falshood, to examine, and enquire attentively, under what impressions they act.

It is too often the case in political concerns, that men state facts not as they are, but as they wish them to be; and almost every man, by calling to mind past scenes, will find this to be true.

Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.

Nothing is more simple than greatness; indeed, to be simple is to be great.

Speak what you think today in hard words and tomorrow speak what tomorrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said today.

I pack my trunk, embrace my friends, embark on the sea and at last wake up in Naples, and there beside me is the stern fact, the sad self, unrelenting, identical, that I fled from.

Whatever games are played with us, we must play no games with ourselves, but deal in our privacy with the last honesty and truth.

To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart, is true for all men,—that is genius. Speak your latent conviction, and it shall be the universal sense; for the inmost in due time becomes the outmost,—and our first thought is rendered back to us by the trumpets of the Last Judgment.