Quotes About Truth

The final allegation of the accuser states that Socrates made a mischievous use of certain passages in the most highly reputed poets, interpreting, for example, a line from Hesiod to mean that one should abstain from no unjust or shameful deed but do even such things for the sake of gain. Xenophon's response speaks of Socrates' standard as the beneficial or the good; it says nothing about his views on the noble and just.

a wish is not a fact. Even by proving that a certain view is indispensable for living well, one proves merely that the view in question is a salutary myth: one does not prove it to be true. Utility and truth are two entirely different things.

Polemarchos no longer maintains that telling the truth is essential to justice. Without knowing it, he thus lays down one of the principles of the Republic. As appears later in the work, in a well-ordered society it is necessary that one tell untruths of a certain kind to children and even to the adult subjects.

E soprattutto, non dobbiamo ingannare noi stessi: non dobbiamo mai cercare di alleviare le nostre frustrazioni e amarezze per una morte che tarda ad arrivare illudendoci di uccidere qualcuno per difendere la sua dignità.

Tell me anyway--Maybe I can find the truth by comparing the lies.

si una mentira se repetía con la frecuencia suficiente, hasta los que sabían que era una mentira la consideraban pronto como si fuese verdad.

It's clear.

They were the weary down there, the craggy-faced, knobby, leather-handed toilers rehearsing their own demise, yielding in pitiful weakness to the scythe of mystery kept poised a lifetime at their jugulars … too simple and too tired to protest … too frightened to seek the truth … succumbed in silence, for without it … what was there left to believe?

Reality is one of the possibilities I cannot afford to ignore

Innocence has a single voice that can only say over and over again, I didn't do it. Guilt has a thousand voices, all of them lies.

Robert Frost wrote in 1914, "Why abandon a belief / Merely because it ceases to be true.

The mythical stories we tell about our heroes are always more romantic and often more palatable than the truth.

Believing in what you desire to be true and then seeking evidence to justify it doesn't seem to be the best approach to everyday decisions.

A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die

medieval scholars made surprising progress, despite living in an age in which people routinely judged the truth of statements not according to empirical evidence but by how well they fit into their preexisting system of religion-based beliefs—a culture that is inimical

medieval scholars made surprising progress, despite living in an age in which people routinely judged the truth of statements not according to empirical evidence but by how well they fit into their preexisting system of religion-based beliefs—a culture that is inimical to science as we know it today.

As the psychologist Jonathan Haidt put it, there are two ways to get at the truth: the way of the scientist and the way of the lawyer. Scientists gather evidence, look for regularities, form theories explaining their observations, and test them. Attorneys begin with a conclusion they want to convince others of and then seek evidence that supports it, while also attempting to discredit evidence that doesn't.

It is one thing to suspect that archers and astronomers, chemists and marketers, encounter the same error law; it is another to discover the specific form of that law.

Poetry to [Milosz], then, was not so much a weapon as a witness against evil.

When the leading voices of the emotionalist Republic championed "feeling," it was not as a source of knowledge or of human happiness, but of freedom: the freedom from objectivity, method, logic, fact. It was feeling not as an alleged means to truth, but as the nullification of thought.

In an objective approach, force and value are opposites. The goal of a proper society, accordingly, is not to compel truth or virtue (which would be a contradiction in terms), but to make them possible—by ensuring that men are left free.

There is no such thing as truth," explains Hitler, "either in the moral or in the scientific sense." Or as Goebbels puts the point: "Important is not what is right but what wins.

I tell you," declared Goering, dismissing a criticism of Hitler's economic policies, "if the Fuhrer wishes it then two times two are five."24

The first thing to say about that which is is simply: it is. As Parmenides in ancient Greece formulated the principle: what is, is. Or, in Ayn Rand's words: existence exists.