Quotes About Truth

I maintain that Truth is a pathless land, and you cannot approach it by any path whatsoever, by any religion, by any sect.

Leniency for confession, severity for resistance! Hand

What a terrible man, I thought, worse than a traitor. At least a traitor betrays people by telling the truth. Uncle Zhu tried to save himself by telling lies.

That doesn't mean that you should make up a story about something you never did!" Dad's voice grew still louder. "So what if I never listened to foreign radio broadcasts? They'll stop beating me if I confess to it, won't they? 'Leniency to those who confess, and severity to those who resist.' Look at my face, Lao Jiang. I can't stand it anymore… .

Which memories will we take with us? The swimming lyricism of paintings, a last breath of a stanza, the mute kiss of a lover? And there is nothing compared to this: lying awake under the truth of you, the wide eyed sleeplessness of lost dreams. — Jill Battson, from "A Goodbye Poem," Canadian Poetry Online

The omitting the Word will be regarded as an Endeavour to conceal a principle of which we are ashamed.

By the Collision of different Sentiments," Franklin wrote, "Sparks of Truth are struck out, and political Light is obtained.

In the primitive simplicity of their minds they are more easily victimized by a large than by a small lie, since they sometimes tell petty lies themselves but would be ashamed to tell big ones.

Right wrongs no man.

The United States rests on a dedication to equality, which is chiefly a moral idea, rooted in Christianity, but it rests, too, on a dedication to inquiry, fearless and unflinching. Its founders agreed with the Scottish philosopher and historian David Hume, who wrote, in 1748, that "Records of Wars, Intrigues, Factions, and Revolutions are so many Collections of Experiments."9 They believed that truth is to be found in ideas about morality but also in the study of history.

The only way to answer the question "Are things getting better or are they getting worse?" is to discover whether modern man knows more or is wiser than his ancestors, Weaver argued. And his answer to this question was no. With the scientific revolution, "facts"—particular explanations for how the world works—had replaced "truth"—a general understanding of the meaning of its existence.

History is the art of making an argument about the past by telling a story accountable to evidence.

This is the propagandist's opportunity," Lippmann wrote.156 With enough money, and with the tools of mass communication, deployed efficiently, the propagandist can turn a political majority into a truth.

TO WRITE SOMETHING down doesn't make it true. But the history of truth is lashed to the history of writing like a mast to a sail.

Can a political society really be governed by reflection and election, by reason and truth, rather than by accident and violence, by prejudice and deceit?

was doomed to fall short, because of the gap between facts and truth.

that people so often believe themselves to be right is no proof that they are.

Welles later insisted that his point, all along, had been to raise Americans' awareness about the perils of radio in an age of propaganda. "People suspect what they read in the newspaper," he said, but "when radio came . . . anything that came through that new machine was believed.

Simulacra and Simulation, a metatext about the meaningless "hell of simulation.

After Benjamin Franklin read Jefferson's draft, he picked up his quill, scratched out the words "sacred and undeniable," and suggested that "these truths" were, instead, "self-evident." This was mroe than a quibble. Truths that are sacred and undeniable are God-given and divine, the stuff of religion. Truths that are self-evident are laws of nature, empirical and observable, the stuff of science.

Does American history prove these truths, or does it belie them?

But the university has obligations, too, to freedom of speech, whose premise, however idealized, is that, in a battle between truth and error, truth, in an open field will always win. If the commitment to these difficult freedoms has sometimes flagged...it has just as often been renewed. Free speech is not a week or a place. It is a long and strenuous argument, as maddening as the past and as painful as the truth.

The person of faith cannot accept reason as the arbiter of truth without giving up on faith...

Most men indeed as well as most sects in Religion, think themselves in possession of all truth, and that wherever others differ from them it is so far error.