Quotes About Truth

You've got your answer then, haven't you?' Lydia nods. She has. She knew it all along. But sometimes it takes an artificially intelligent simulation of a long dead Beatle to put things in perspective.

James Baldwin's words haunt: "People who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction, and anyone who insists on remaining in a state of innocence long after that innocence is dead turns himself into a monster." Are we a nation of monsters?

What we put in and leave out of our stories tells us something about who we are.

King told the audience that night, "was that black people have been kept in oppression and deprivation by a poisonous fog of lies that depicted them as inferior, born deficient, and deservedly doomed to servitude to the grave." He went on to say that "so long as the lie was believed the brutality and criminality of conduct toward the Negro was easy for the conscience to bear.

On one level, it is the interregnum surrounded by the ghosts of the dying moment, and on another, the moment that is desperately trying to be born with a lie wrapped around its neck.

We lie and cover up our sins and mute the traumas they cause. We dissociate the trauma from our national self-understanding and locate it, if at all, in the ungrateful cries of grievance and victimization among those who experienced the pain and loss.

Gratitude is expected. Having secured our innocence, we feel no guilt in enjoying what we have earned by our own merit, in defending our right to educate our children in the best schools and in demanding that we be judged by our ability alone. To maintain this illusion, Trump has to be seen as singular, aberrant. Otherwise, he reveals something terrible about us. But not to see yourself in Trump is to continue to lie.

the idea that in America white lives have always mattered more than the lives of others, then the lie is a broad and powerful architecture of false assumptions by

people who settled the country had a fatal flaw. They could recognize a man when they saw one. They knew he wasn't…anything else but a man; but since they were Christian, and since they had already decided that they came here to establish a free country, the only way to justify the role this chattel was playing in one's life was to say that he was not a man. For if he wasn't, then no crime had been committed. That lie is the basis of our present trouble. American

We have to get the facts right as best as we can. Otherwise, history becomes what Du Bois referred to as "lies agreed upon.

Tell the story. Make it real for those who refuse to believe that such a thing can happen/has happened/is happening here. Bring the suffering to the attention of those who wallow in willful ignorance. In short, shatter the illusion of innocence at every turn and attack all the shibboleths the country holds sacred.

not place that suffering all at the feet of Donald Trump, but understand it as the inevitable outcome in a country that continues to lie to itself.

Today, our task remains the same, no matter its difficulty or the magnitude of the challenge. Some of us must become poets, but we all must bear witness. Make the suffering real and force the world to pay attention to it, and not place that suffering all at the feet of Donald Trump, but understand it as the inevitable outcome in a country that continues to lie to itself.

But the lie's most pernicious effect when it comes to our history is to malform events to fit the story whenever America's innocence is threatened by reality.

The white southerner had to lie continuously to himself in order to justify his world. Lie that the black people around him were inferior. Lie about what he was doing under the cover of night. Lie that he was Christian. For Baldwin, the accumulation of lies suffocated the white southerner.

There has never been a mechanism, through something like a truth and reconciliation commission, for telling ourselves the truth about what we have done in a way that would broadly legitimate government policies to repair systemic discrimination across generations. Instead, we pine for national rituals of expiation that wash away our guilt without the need for an admission of guilt,

The seventies involved a confrontation with a frightening truth: that despite the sacrifices and costs of the black freedom struggle, the country remained profoundly racist and, no matter its proclamations to the contrary, white America was perfectly comfortable with that fact.

If the condition of the love of country is a lie, the love itself, no matter how genuine, is a lie.

In the effort to deny from whence we came," Baldwin declared, "we've had to make up a series of myths about it.

perfection. The lie is the story that warps reality in this country, which means that resisting it involves telling in each moment a truer story, one that casts the lie into relief, showing it for what it is. And

Best believe that needle hurt you Best to see these true colors Than follow one of your false virtues A little secret to make you think: Why is the crazy stuff we never say, poetry in ink?

Definition of laying: you get cut sooner or later.

El sentido común es algo tan raro que su aplicación asombra al mundo, y quienes tienen la habilidad de emplearlo son declarados genios. El genio es, para decir la verdad, un derivado del sentido común.

I used to think that if I could talk to the spirit world, I'd get some answers. Ha bloody ha. I wish the dead would just come out and say what they mean instead of being so passive-aggressive about the whole thing.