Quotes About Truth

But as I said to Dr. Rice following her testimony, and I think she appreciated it, we had our job to do and we did it best we could, trying to get answers to the important questions that the 9/11 Commission must answer.

There were no gifts. Everything is properly accounted for. I provided testimony and evidence to the committee... This was all stuff that was previously known.

Testimony demands to be interpreted because of the dialectic of meaning and event that traverses it.

Where we have good, testable explanations, they then have to be tested, and we drop the ones that fail the tests.

Tests that sugar-coat the truth only set up our kids to fail in worse ways down the road.

We look up, if only to see if we're likely to be rained on. The sky calls attention to itself, whether scored by herons, cranes, or wires; illumined by sunsets, Perseids, or ballparks; broken up by the twigwork of oaks or maples, painted in rainbows, or just primed in the pale gray of my '52 Ford. If we are truthful, the sky is never neutral.

Where beats a heart within a human breast, There be Thou present, and Thy power adored! And oh! since all are doom'd one common race To run, and one eternal goal to reach, May Thy prime attribute each bosom warm With tender sympathy and truth; may man Be link'd to man in fellowship of soul, Till one vast chain of Love embrace the world!

Everybody has his own revelations, but the mass of the totality has never been revealed to anybody.

Robert Muchamore

A man who wants the truth becomes a scientist; a man who wants to give free play to his subjectivity may become a writer; but what should a man do who wants something in between?

True' and 'false' are the evasions of people who never want to arrive at a decision. Truth is something without end.

Even in his greatest dedication to science he had never managed to forget that people's goodness and beauty come from what they believe, not from what they know.

There is, in short, no great idea that stupidity could not put to its own uses [....] The truth by comparison, has only one appearance and only one path, and is always at a disadvantage.

Knowledge may be power, but the reverse is not necessarily true.

What trouble we go to, trying to fool people who see right through us anyhow.

As usual the truth lies midway between these two extremes.

Only the refusal to listen guarantees one against being ensnared by the truth.

as a young man I thought the ideal philosophical argument was one with the following property: someone who understood its premises and did not accept its conclusion would die.

23 The novelist Thomas Mann noted in his diary on March 27, 1933, two months after Hitler had become German chancellor, that he had witnessed a revolution of a kind never seen before, "without underlying ideas, against ideas, against everything nobler, better, decent, against freedom, truth and justice." The "common scum" had taken power, "accompanied by vast rejoicing on the part of the masses.

Robert Olen Butler

Every speaker has a mouth An arrangement rather neat. Sometimes it's filled with wisdom. Sometimes it's filled with feet.

Finding and knowing, rather than absorbing dictums, is what "deeper understanding" is. It is a conscious and direct perception of the unity of life, a removal of the mind's internal barriers to direct understanding and knowledge, and "seeing" truth on another level.

Finding that no religion is based on facts and cannot therefore be true, I began to reflect what must be the condition of mankind trained from infancy to believe in errors.

Conviction, Nietzsche said, is a greater enemy of truth than lies.)