Quotes About Truth

Sincerity, authenticity, integrity, mutual understanding—these and other sources of moral wealth are destroyed the moment we deliberately misrepresent our beliefs, whether or not our lies are ever discovered.

The opportunity to decieve others is ever present and often tempting, and each instance of deception casts us onto some of the steepest ethical terrain we ever cross.

Religion is nothing more than bad concepts held in place of good ones for all time. It is denial - at once full of hope and full of fear - of the vastitude of human ignorance.

Many truths about ourselves will be discovered in consciousness directly or not discovered at all.

La mayor parte de las formas de degradación personal y maldad pública se desencadenan y sustentan con la mentira. Los actos de adulterio y demás deslealtades personales, el fraude económico, la corrupción gubernamental... hasta el asesinato y el genocidio suelen requerir un defecto moral adicional: la disposición para mentir.

Honesty is a gift we can give to others. It is also a source of power and an engine of simplicity. Knowing that we will attempt to tell the truth, whatever the circumstances, leaves us with little to prepare for. We can simply be ourselves.

Aceptar mantener un secreto es asumir una carga.

People who hold strong convictions without evidence, belong at the margins of our society, not in our halls of power.

Consciousness is the one thing in the universe that cannot be an illusion--even if I'm a brain in a vat, all my memories are false, and my perceptions are of a world that doesn't exist, I'm still having an experience.

Faith, if it is ever right about anything, is right by accident.

What we need to become happier and to make the world a better place is not more pious illusions but a clearer understanding of the way things are.

Many religious moderates have taken the apparent high road of pluralism, asserting the equal validity of all faiths, but in doing so they neglect to notice the irredeemably sectarian truth claims of each. As long as a Christian believes that only his baptized brethren will be saved on the Day of Judgment, he cannot possibly respect the beliefs of others, for he knows that the flames of hell have been stoked by these very ideas and await their adherents even now.

Rather often, to lie is to infringe upon the freedom of those we care about.

It is time we admitted, from kings and presidents on down, that there is no evidence that any of our books was authored by the Creator of the universe.

As long as it is acceptable for a person to believe that he knows how God wants everyone on earth to live, we will continue to murder one another on account of our myths.

Christopher Hitchens for distilling, in a single phrase, a principle of discourse that could well arrest our slide toward the abyss: "what can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence."15 Let us pray that billions of us soon agree with him.

Wherever there are right and wrong answers to important questions, there will be better or worse ways to get those answers and better or worse ways to put them to use.

When we presume to lie for the benefit of others, we have decided that we are the best judges of how much they should understand about their own lives—about

The problem with religion is that it blends this truth so thoroughly with the venom of unreason.

The fascist says, It's not what you think, or what you think you know, that is important. The only truth is whether or not you feel subjectively, spiritually, part of a larger national community __ and if you do, wonderful! And if you don't, then you're an enemy.

to lie is to infringe upon the freedom of those we care about.

We're not really free unless we can put matters in our own words. And if we can't put them in our own words, we can't talk to other people, because if we speak the words of the internet or the TV news, other people will recognize that, and they are not really in our company, but somewhere else.

Lying is the royal road to chaos.   As

I also heard from readers whose parents had told the truth about Santa simply because they didn't want the inevitable unraveling of the Christmas myth to cast any doubt on the divinity of Jesus. I suppose some ironies are harder to detect than others.