Quotes About Truth

Realism...is a kind of disappointed tribute to the ideal.

The first axiom of Marx Scientist is that everything they tell you is a lie. The second axiom is that it doesn't matter, since you are lying too. The third axiom is 'Kill all liars!

A writer who says that there are no truths, or that all truth is 'merely relative', is asking you not to believe him. So don't.

Nonsemes and mathemes stand next to each other in detached and mutually irrelevant jumbles. They lack the crucial valency that ties sentence to sentence in a truth-directed argument or formula to formula in a valid proof, and they can accumulate forever without getting to the point of saying or revealing what they mean.

One thing is immediately apparent, and this is that many statements made in the first-person case are epistemologically privileged.

That, in my view, is the truth in socialism, the truth of our mutual dependence, and of the need to do what we can to spread the benefits of social membership to those whose own efforts do not suffice to obtain them.

The goal, Karel said, was not to tell explicit lies but to destroy the distinction between the true and the false, so that lying becomes neither necessary nor possible.

The assault on the human world in the name of science is more pseudo-science than science, and rejoices in its bald, unmoralised image of 'what we really are'. What we really are from the scientific point of view is precisely what we really aren't.

Paul Benacerraf, 'What Numbers Could Not Be,' Philosophical Review (1965).

Robert Conquest once announced three laws of politics, the first of which says that everyone is right-wing in the matters he knows about.

law of nature that our scientific thinking tends toward the truth, our morality toward the good, and maybe (though he doesn't go this far) our tastes toward the beautiful.

If we cannot justify the very concept of the aesthetic, except as ideology, then aesthetic judgement is without philosophical foundation. An 'ideology' is adopted for its social or political utility, rather than its truth. And

The content of every thought must be given, in the last analysis, in terms of the experiences that warrant it, and no belief can be established as true except by reference to the sensory 'impressions' that provide its guarantee. (This is the general assumption of empiricism.)

how can I know the world as it is? I can have knowledge of the world as it seems, since that is merely knowledge of my present perceptions, memories, thoughts, and feelings. But can I have knowledge of the world that is not just knowledge of how it seems? To put the question in slightly more general form: can I have knowledge of the world that is not just knowledge of my own point of view?

In figurative painting, in tonal music, in the cliché-ridden poems of heroic love and mythic glory, we find the same disease – the artist is not exploring the human heart but creating a puffed-up substitute, and then putting it on sale.

The idea that scientific method is the only method of discovering the truth has a lot to be said for it, if you mean by truth how the world ultimately is as a system of organised matter, but I defend cognitive dualism: that world can be understood completely in another way which also has its truths which are not translatable into the truths of science. So we have to look at the different ways we organise this material that science explains for us.

realities instead.

It should not be thought that the cost of a system which makes an idol of ignorance and a prophet of the crowd is small.

Ideological opinion is not merely distinct from knowledge but the enemy of knowledge.

You can endure insults and abuse when you know them to be false. But if the remarks that offend you are true, their truth becomes a dagger in the soul - you cry lies! at the top of your voice, and know that you must silence the one who utters them.

It would be nice if there were some one thing constant and unchanging in the universe. If there is such a thing, then it is a thing which would have to be stronger than love, and it is a thing which I do not know.

I'm very gullible when it comes to my own words. I believe everything I say, though I know I am a liar.

Which one is the right way? Huh? You're asking me that ? How should I know? Mortals call you Buddha. That is only because they are afflicted with language and ignorance.

I'm very gullible when it comes to my own words. I believe everything I say, though I know I'm a liar.