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|  Peter Abelard | The key to wisdom is this -- constant and frequent questioning ... for by doubting we are led to question and by questioning we arrive at the truth. | |
| Henry Brooks Adams | I would rather starve and rot and keep the privilege of speaking the truth as I see it, than of holding all the offices that capital has to give from the presidency down. | |
| John Adams | The priesthood have, in all ancient nations, nearly monopolized learning.... And, even since the Reformation, when or where has existed a Protestant or dissenting sect who would tolerate A FREE INQUIRY? The blackest billingsgate, the most ungentlemanly insolence, the most yahooish brutality is patiently endured, countenanced, propagated, and applauded. But touch a solemn truth in collision with a dogma of a sect, though capable of the clearest proof, and you will soon find you have disturbed a nest, and the hornets will swarm about your legs and hands, and fly into your face and eyes. | |
| John Adams | Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passion, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence. | |
| John Adams | The Revolution was effected before the War commenced. The Revolution was in the minds and hearts of the people; a change in their religious sentiments of their duties and obligations ... This radical change in the principles, opinions, sentiments, and affections of the people, was the real American Revolution. | |
| John Adams | The truth is that neither then nor at any former time, since I had attained my maturity in Age, Reading and reflection had I imbibed any general Prejudice against Kings, or in favour of them. It appeared to me then as it has done ever since, that there is a State of Society in which a Republican Government is the best, and in America the only one... | |
| John Adams | Human nature itself is evermore an advocate for liberty. There is also in human nature a resentment of injury, and indignation against wrong. A love of truth and a veneration of virtue. These amiable passions, are the "latent spark"... If the people are capable of understanding, seeing and feeling the differences between true and false, right and wrong, virtue and vice, to what better principle can the friends of mankind apply than to the sense of this difference? | |
| John Adams | Human nature itself is evermore an advocate for liberty. There is also in human nature a resentment of injury, and indignation against wrong. A love of truth and a veneration of virtue. These amiable passions, are the "latent spark"… If the people are capable of understanding, seeing and feeling the differences between true and false, right and wrong, virtue and vice, to what better principle can the friends of mankind apply than to the sense of this difference? | |
| John Adams | The divinity of Jesus is made a convenient cover for absurdity. Nowhere in the Gospels do we find a precept for Creeds, Confessions, Oaths, Doctrines, and whole car-loads of other foolish trumpery that we find in Christianity. | |
| John Adams | When people talk of the freedom of writing, speaking, or thinking, I cannot choose but laugh. No such thing ever existed. No such thing now exists; but I hope it will exist. But it must be hundreds of years after you and I shall write and speak no more. | |
| Samuel Adams | If ye love wealth better than liberty, the tranquility of servitude better than the animating contest of freedom, go home from us in peace. We ask not your counsels or your arms. Crouch down and lick the hands which feed you. May your chains set lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that you were our countrymen. | |
| Alfred Adler | A lie would have no sense unless the truth were felt dangerous. | |
| Aeschylus | In war, truth is the first casualty. | |
| Aeschylus | Words are the physicians of the mind diseased. | |
| Aesop | Beware lest you lose the substance by grasping at the shadow. | |
| Publius Terentius Afer | In fact, nothing is said that has not been said before. | |
| Herbert Sebastien Agar | The truth that makes men free is for the most part the truth which men prefer not to hear. | |
| Mohammed Ali | The man who views the world at 50 the same way he did at 20 has wasted 30 years of his life. | |
| Woody Allen | If only God would give me some clear sign! Like making a large deposit in my name at a Swiss Bank. | |
| Woody Allen | I call the mind free which jealously guards its intellectual rights and powers, which calls no man master [and] receives new truth as an angel from Heaven. | |
| Henri Frederic Amiel | Philosophy means the complete liberty of the mind, and therefore independence of all social, political or religious prejudice... It loves one thing only... truth. | |
| Hannah Arendt | The moment we no longer have a free press, anything can happen. What makes it possible for a totalitarian or any other dictatorship to rule is that people are not informed; how can you have an opinion if you are not informed? If everybody always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer. This is because lies, by their very nature, have to be changed, and a lying government has constantly to rewrite its own history. On the receiving end you get not only one lie -- a lie which you could go on for the rest of your days -- but you get a great number of lies, depending on how the political wind blows. And a people that no longer can believe anything cannot make up its mind. It is deprived not only of its capacity to act but also of its capacity to think and to judge. And with such a people you can then do what you please. | |
| Aristotle | The least initial deviation from the truth is multiplied later a thousandfold. | |
| Aristotle | The high-minded man must care more for the truth than for what people think. | |
| Isaac Asimov | Humanity has the stars in its future, and that future is too important to be lost under the burden of juvenile folly and ignorant superstition. | |
| Nancy Astor | Truth always originates in a minority of one, and every custom begins as a broken precedent. | |
| Saint Augustine | Give me chastity and self-restraint, but do not give it yet. | |
| Aung San Suu Kyi | The quintessential revolution is that of the spirit, born of an intellectual conviction of the need for change in those mental attitudes and values which shape the course of a nation's development. A revolution which aims merely at changing official policies and institutions with a view to an improvement in material conditions has little chance of genuine success. Without a revolution in spirit, the forces which had produced inequities of the old order would continue to be operative, posing a constant threat to the process of reform and regeneration. It is not enough merely to call for freedom, democracy and human rights. There has to be a united determination to persevere in the struggle, to make sacrifices in the name of enduring truths, to resist the corrupting influences of desire, ill will, ignorance, and fear. | |
| Francis Bacon | Men prefer to believe what they prefer to be true. | |
| Sir Francis Bacon | For whatever deserves to exist deserves also to be known, for knowledge is the image of existence, and things mean and splendid exist alike. | |
| Sir Francis Bacon | Knowledge is power. | |
| Sir Francis Bacon | A forbidden writing is thought to be a certain spark of truth, that flies up in the face of them who seek to tread it out. | |
| Sir Francis Bacon | The man who fears no truths has nothing to fear from lies. | |
| Sir Francis Bacon | Man prefers to believe what he prefers to be true. | |
| Roger Bacon | There are in fact four very significant stumblingblocks in the way of grasping the truth, which hinder every man however learned, and scarcely allow anyone to win a clear title to wisdom, namely, the example of weak and unworthy authority, longstanding custom, the feeling of the ignorant crowd, and the hiding of our own ignorance while making a display of our apparent knowledge. | |
| Walter Bagehot | So long as there are earnest believers in the world, they will always wish to punish opinions, even if their judgment tells them it is unwise and their conscience tells them it is wrong. | |
| Hosea Ballou | Weary the path that does not challenge. Doubt is an incentive to truth and patient inquiry leadeth the way. | |
| Matsuo Basho | Do not seek to follow in the footsteps of the wise. Seek what they sought. | |
| Frederic Bastiat | Sometimes the law defends plunder and participates in it. Thus the beneficiaries are spared the shame and danger that their acts would otherwise involve... But how is this legal plunder to be identified? Quite simply. See if the law takes from some persons what belongs to them and gives it to the other persons to whom it doesn't belong. See if the law benefits one citizen at the expense of another by doing what the citizen himself cannot do without committing a crime. Then abolish that law without delay ... No legal plunder; this is the principle of justice, peace, order, stability, harmony and logic. | |
| Frederic Bastiat | The worst thing that can happen to a good cause is not to be skillfully attacked, but to be ineptly defended. | |
| O. A. Battista | One of the hardest things to teach a child is that the truth is more important than the consequences. | |
| Charles Baudelaire | The finest trick of the devil is to persuade you that he does not exist. | |
| Elias Root Beadle | Half the work that is done in this world is to make things appear what they are not. | |
| Cesare Beccaria | The laws of this nature are those which forbid to wear arms, disarming those only who are not disposed to commit the crime which the laws mean to prevent. Can it be supposed, that those who have the courage to violate the most sacred laws of humanity, and the most important of the code, will respect the less considerable and arbitrary injunctions, the violation of which is so easy, and of so little comparative importance? Does not the execution of this law deprive the subject of that personal liberty, so dear to mankind and to the wise legislator? and does it not subject the innocent to all the disagreeable circumstances that should only fall on the guilty? It certainly makes the situation of the assaulted worse, and of the assailants better, and rather encourages than prevents murder, as it requires less courage to attack unarmed than armed persons. | |
| Cesare Beccaria | False is the idea of utility that sacrifices a thousand real advantages for one imaginary or trifling inconvenience; that would take fire from men because it burns, and water because one may drown in it; that has no remedy for evils except destruction. | |
| Cesare Beccaria | A principal source of errors and injustice are false ideas of utility. For example: that legislator has false ideas of utility who considers particular more than general conveniencies, who had rather command the sentiments of mankind than excite them, who dares say to reason, 'Be thou a slave;' who would sacrifice a thousand real advantages to the fear of an imaginary or trifling inconvenience; who would deprive men of the use of fire for fear of their being burnt, and of water for fear of their being drowned; and who knows of no means of preventing evil but by destroying it. | |
| Cesare Beccaria | False is the idea of utility that sacrifices a thousand real advantages for one imaginary or trifling inconvenience; that would take fire from men because it burns, and water because one may drown in it; that has no remedy for evils except destruction. The laws that forbid the carrying of arms are laws of such a nature. They disarm only those who are neither inclined nor determined to commit crimes. Can it be supposed that those who have the courage to violate the most sacred laws of humanity, the most important of the code, will respect the less important and arbitrary ones, which can be violated with ease and impunity, and which, if strictly obeyed, would put an end to personal liberty... and subject innocent persons to all the vexations that the guilty alone ought to suffer? Such laws make things worse for the assaulted and better for the assailants; they serve rather to encourage than to prevent homicides, for an unarmed man may be attacked with greater confidence than an armed man. They ought to be designated as laws not preventive but fearful of crimes, produced by the tumultuous impression of a few isolated facts, and not by thoughtful consideration of the inconveniences and advantages of a universal decree. | |
| Hugo Adam Bedau | Government should allow persons to engage in whatever conduct they want to, no matter how deviant or abnormal it may be, so long as (a) they know what they are doing, (b) they consent to it, and (c) no one -- at least no one other than the participants -- is harmed by it. | |
| Clive Bell | Only reason can convince us of those three fundamental truths without a recognition of which there can be no effective liberty: that what we believe is not necessarily true; that what we like is not necessarily good; and that all questions are open. | |
| Cardnial Robert Bellarmine | To assert that the earth revolves around the sun is as erroneous to claim that Jesus was not born of a virgin. | |
| Henry Bellmon | In a recent conversation with an official at the Internal Revenue Service, I was amazed when he told me that 'If the taxpayers of this country ever discover that the IRS operates on 90% bluff the entire system will collapse' . | |
| David K. Berninghausen | In order to get the truth, conflicting arguments and expression must be allowed. There can be no freedom without choice, no sound choice without knowledge. | |
| Daniel Joseph Berrigan | But how shall we educate men to goodness, to a sense of one another, to a love of truth? And more urgently,
how shall we do this in a bad time? | |
| Sir Walter Besant | Tolerance is the eager and glad acceptance of the way along which others seek the truth. | |
| Mary McLeod Bethune | If we accept and acquiesce in the face of discrimination, we accept the responsibility ourselves. We should, therefore, protest openly everything ... that smacks of discrimination or slander. | |
| Ambrose Bierce | Faith: Belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks without knowledge, of things without parallel. | |
| Ambrose Bierce | Logic: The art of thinking and reasoning in strict accordance with the limitations and incapacities of the human misunderstanding. | |
| Ambrose Bierce | Optimism: The doctrine that everything is beautiful, including what is ugly, everything good, especially the bad, and everything right that is wrong. ... It is hereditary, but fortunately not contagious. | |
| Ambrose Bierce | As records of courts and justice are admissible, it can easily be proved that powerful and malevolent magicians once existed and were a scourge to mankind... Nothing in any existing court was ever more thoroughly proved than the charges of witchcraft and sorcery for which so many suffered death. If there were no witches, human testimony and human reason are alike destitute of value. | |
| Ambrose Bierce | Heathen, n. A benighten creature who has the folly to worship something that he can see and feel. | |
| Josh Billings | The trouble with most folks isn't so much their ignorance, as knowing so many things that ain't so. | |
| Jim Bishop | The truth which makes men free is for the most part the truth which men prefer not to hear. | |
| Justice Hugo L. Black | I am for the First Amendment from the first word to the last. I believe it means what it says. | |
| William Blake | A truth that's told with bad intent, beats all the lies you can invent. | |
| Niels Bohr | The opposite of a correct statement is a false statement. The opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth. | |
| Napoleon Bonaparte | History is the version of past events that people have decided to agree upon. | |
| Daniel Boorstin | We must abandon the prevalent belief in the superior wisdom of the ignorant. | |
| Jorge Luis Borges | Reality is not always probable, or likely. | |
| Ludwig Börne | Only the suppressed word is dangerous. | |
| Charles Bradlaugh | Without free speech no search for truth is possible... no discovery of truth is useful. Better a thousand fold abuse of free speech than denial of free speech. The abuse dies in a day, but the denial slays the life of the people. | |
| Robert Brault | Today I bent the truth to be kind, and I have no regret, for I am far surer of what is kind than I am of what is true. | |
| Ashleigh Brilliant | To be sure of hitting the target, shoot first, and call whatever you hit the target. | |
| David Brinkley | The one function that TV news performs very well is that when there is no news we give it to you with the same emphasis as if there were. | |
| Jacob Bronowski | There is no absolute knowledge. And those who claim it, whether they are scientists or dogmatists, open the door to tragedy. All information is imperfect. We have to treat it with humility. | |
| Bellamy Brooks | Egotism is the anesthetic given by a kindly nature to relieve the pain of being a damned fool. | |
| H. Jackson Brown, Jr. | People take different roads seeking fulfillment & happiness. Just because they're not on your road doesn't mean they've gotten lost. | |
| Merry Browne | The elegance of honesty needs no adornment. | |
| Sir Thomas Browne | The mortalist enemy unto knowledge, and that which hath done the greatest execution unto truth, has been a preemptory adhesion unto authority. | |
| Giordano Bruno | It is proof of a base and low mind for one to wish to think with the masses or majority, merely because the majority is the majority. Truth does not change because it is, or is not, believed by a majority of the people. | |
| William Cullen Bryant | Truth, crushed to earth, shall rise again. | |
| James Buchanan | What is right and what is practicable are two different things. | |
| Pearl S. Buck | None who have always been free can understand the terrible fascinating power of the hope of freedom to those who are not free. | |
| Pearl S. Buck | Truth is always exciting. Speak it, then; life is dull without it. | |
| William F. Buckley, Jr. | We are so concerned to flatter the majority that we lose sight of how very often it is necessary, in order to preserve freedom for the minority, let alone for the individual, to face that majority down. | |
| Buddha | | |
| Buddha | There are only two mistakes one can make along the road to truth; not going all the way, and not starting. | |
| Buddha | Believe nothing merely because you have been told it. Do not believe what your teacher tells you merely out of respect for the teacher. But whatsoever, after due examination and analysis, you find to be kind, conducive to the good, the benefit, the welfare of all beings -- that doctrine believe and cling to, and take it as your guide. | |
| Buddha | Words have the power to both destroy and heal. When words are both true and kind, they can change our world. | |
| Edward Bulwer-Lytton | The pen is mightier than the sword. | |
| Edward G. Bulwer-Lytton | There is no man so friendless but what he can find a friend sincere enough to tell him disagreeable truths. | |
| Luther Burbank | It is well for people who think to change their minds occasionally in order to keep them clean. For those who do not think, it is best at least to rearrange their prejudices once in a while. | |
| Edmund Burke | The first and simplest emotion which we discover in the human mind, is curiosity. | |
| Edmund Burke | The people never give up their liberties, but under some delusion. | |
| Edwin Arthur Burtt | As compared with impulsive commitment to the first idea which dawns, that is, with intuitive action, reasoning is patient, exploratory of other possibilities, and deliberative. | |
| Nicholas Murray Butler | The one serious conviction that a man should have is that nothing is to be taken too seriously. | |
| Samuel Butler | I don't mind lying, but I hate inaccuracy. | |
| Gaius Julius Caesar | Men willingly believe what they wish. | |
| John Cage | I can't understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I'm frightened of the old ones. | |
| John C. Calhoun | A power has risen up in the government greater than the people themselves, consisting of many and various powerful interests, combined in one mass, and held together by the cohesive power of the vast surplus in banks. | |
| Albert Camus | An intellectual is someone whose mind watches itself. | |
| Al Capone | When I sell liquor, it's called bootlegging; when my patrons serve it on Lake Shore Drive, it's called hospitality. | |
| Andrew Carnegie | As I grow older, I pay less attention to what men say. I just watch what they do. | |
| Lewis Carroll | Contrariwise", continued Tweedledee, "If it was so, it might be; and if it were so, it would be; but as it isn't, it ain't. That's logic. | |
| Jimmy Carter | If you fear making anyone mad, then you ultimately probe for the lowest common denominator of human achievement. | |
| Helena Cassadine | Ah yes, truth. Funny how everyone is always asking for it
but when they get it they don't believe it because
it's not the truth they want to hear. | |
| Stuart Chase | For those who believe, no proof is necessary. For those who don’t believe, no proof is possible. | |
| Gilbert Keith Chesterton | But those dealing in the actual manufacture of mind are dealing in a very explosive material. The material is not merely the clay of which man is master, but the truths or semblances of truth which have a certain mastery over man. The material is explosive because it must be taken seriously. The men writing books really are throwing bombs. | |
| Gilbert Keith Chesterton | What is education? Properly speaking, there is no such thing as education. Education is simply the soul of a society as it passes from one generation to another. Whatever the soul is like, it will have to be passed on somehow, consciously or unconsciously, and that transition may be called education. ... What we need is to have a culture before we hand it down. In other words, it is a truth, however sad and strange, that we cannot give what we have not got, and cannot teach to other people what we do not know ourselves. | |
| Gilbert Keith Chesterton | Correctitude implies nowadays a formal or fastidious use of words; and what is wanted is not so much the correct as the living use of words. It is the memory of the meaning of a word which is the life of the word. | |
| Gilbert Keith Chesterton | The life of a thinking man will probably be divided into two parts -- the first in which he desires to exterminate modern thinkers, and the second in which he desires to watch them exterminating each other. ... Suppose, for instance, there is an old story and a new skeptic who is skeptical of the story. We have only to wait a little while for a yet newer skeptic who is skeptical of the skeptic. He will probably find the old notion actually a help in his new notion. This process is an abstract truth applying to anything, apart from agreement or disagreement. | |
| Gilbert Keith Chesterton | The theory of free speech, that truth is so much larger and stranger and more many-sided than we know of, that it is very much better at all costs to hear everyone’s account of it, is a theory which has been justified on the whole by experiment, but which remains a very daring and even a very surprising theory. It is really one of the great discoveries of the modern time. | |
| Gilbert Keith Chesterton | Truth is sacred and if you tell the truth too often nobody will believe it. | |
| Chinese Proverb | The beginning of wisdom is to call things by their right names. | |
| Sir Winston Churchill | The greatest lesson in life is to know that even fools are right sometimes. | |
| Sir Winston Churchill | Truth is incontrovertible, ignorance can deride it, panic may resent it, malice may destroy it, but there it is. | |
| Sir Winston Churchill | There are a lot of lies going around... and half of them are true. | |
| Sir Winston Churchill | Courage is the first of human qualities because it is the quality which guarantees all others. | |
| Sir Winston Churchill | Man will occasionally stumble over the truth, but most times he will pick himself up and carry on. | |
| Sir Winston Churchill | In wartime, truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies. | |
| Winston Churchill | This truth may be unfashionable, unpalatable, no doubt unpopular, but, if it is the truth, the story of mankind shows that war was universal and unceasing for millions of years before armaments were invented or armies organized. Indeed, the lucid intervals of peace and order only occurred in human history after armaments in the hands of strong governments have come into being, and civilization in every age has been nursed only in cradles guarded by superior weapons and superior discipline. | |
| Marcus Tullius Cicero | Wise men are instructed by reason; men of less understanding, by experience; the most ignorant, by necessity; the beasts, by nature. | |
| Marcus Tullius Cicero | By doubting we all come at truth. | |
| William Kingdon Clifford | It is wrong always, everywhere and for everyone to believe anything upon insufficient evidence. | |
| Bill Clinton | Every time Bush talks about trust it makes chills run up and down my spine. The way he has trampled on the truth is a travesty of the American political system. | |
| Bill Clinton | There's just no such thing as truth when it comes to him. He just says whatever sounds good and worries about it after the election. | |
| Bill Clinton | The road to tyranny, we must never forget, begins with the destruction of the truth. | |
| Bill Clinton | I've said I've never broken the drug laws of my country, and that is the absolute truth. | |
| Bill Clinton | The road to tyranny, we must remember, begins with the destruction of the truth. | |
| Samuel Taylor Coleridge | Our own heart, and not other men's opinions form our true honor. | |
| Charles Caleb Colton | Precisely in proportion to our own intellectual weakness will be our credulity as to those mysterious powers assumed by others. | |
| Henry Steele Commager | America was born of revolt, flourished on dissent, became great through experimentation. | |
| Henry Steele Commager | Every effort to confine Americanism to a single pattern, to constrain it to a single formula, is disloyalty to everything that is valid in Americanism. | |
| Henry Steele Commager | Censorship always defeats its own purpose, for it creates, in the end, the kind of society that is incapable of exercising real discretion... In the long run it will create a generation incapable of appreciating the difference between independence of thought and subservience. | |
| Henry Steele Commager | The justification and the purpose of freedom of speech is not to indulge those who want to speak their minds. It is to prevent error and discover truth. There may be other ways of detecting error and discovering truth than that of free discussion, but so far we have not found them. | |
| Confucius | Real knowledge is to know the extent of one's ignorance. | |
| Confucius | If language is not correct, then what is said is not what is meant; if what is said is not what is meant, then what must be done remains undone; if this remains undone, morals and art will deteriorate; if justice goes astray, the people will stand about in helpless confusion. Hence there must be no arbitrariness in what is said. This matters above everything. | |
| William Congreve | No mask like open truth to cover lies,\\As to go naked is the best disguise. | |
| Joseph Conrad | Of all the inanimate objects, of all men’s creations, books are the nearest to us, for they contain our very thoughts, our ambitions, our indignations, our illusions, our fidelity to truth, and our persistent leaning toward error. | |
| Calvin Coolidge | Nature is inexorable. If men do not follow the truth they cannot live. | |
| Thomas Cooper | Every politician, every member of the clerical profession, ought to incur the reasonable suspicion of being an interested supporter of false doctrines, who becomes angry at opposition, and endeavors to cast an odium on free inquiry. Fraud and falsehood only dread examination. Truth invites it. | |
| Bill Copeland | When you stretch the truth, watch out for the snapback. | |
| Noel Coward | I've over-educated myself in all the things I shouldn't have known. | |
| William Cowper | He is the freeman whom the truth makes free. | |
| William Cowper | He is the freeman whom the truth makes free,
And all are slaves besides. | |
| Patrick Cox | The holier-than-thou activists who blame the population for not spending more money on their personal crusades are worse than aggravating. They encourage the repudiation of personal responsibility by spreading the lie that support of a government program fulfills individual moral duty. | |
| Nelson Antrim Crawford | In the United States there is no phenomenon more threatening to popular government than the unwillingness of newspapers to give the facts to their readers. | |
| John Culkin | We don't know who discovered water, but we are certain it wasn't a fish. | |
| Leonardo Da Vinci | Beyond a doubt truth bears the same relation to falsehood as light to darkness. | |
| Edward Dahlberg | It takes a long time to understand nothing. | |
| Theodore Dalrymple | Political correctness is communist propaganda writ small. In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, nor to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is to co-operate with evil, and in some small way to become evil oneself. One's standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control. I think if you examine political correctness, it has the same effect and is intended to. | |
| Clarence S. Darrow | The law does not pretend to punish everything that is dishonest. That would seriously interfere with business. | |
| Clarence S. Darrow | Chase after the truth like all hell and you'll free yourself, even though you never touch its coattails. | |
| Clarence S. Darrow | Liberty is the most jealous and exacting mistress that can beguile the brain and soul of man. From him who will not give her all, she will have nothing. She knows that his pretended love serves but to betray. But when once the fierce heat of her quenchless, lustrous eyes have burned into the victim's heart, he will know no other smile but hers. | |
| Charles Darwin | To suppose that the eye [...] could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest degree. When it was first said that the sun stood still and the world turned round, the common sense of mankind declared the doctrine false; but the old saying of Vox populi, vox Dei, as every philosopher knows, cannot be trusted in science. Reason tells me, that if numerous gradations from a simple and imperfect eye to one complex and perfect can be shown to exist, each grade being useful to its possessor, as is certainly the case; if further, the eye ever varies and the variations be inherited, as is likewise certainly the case and if such variations should be useful to any animal under changing conditions of life, then the difficulty of believing that a perfect and complex eye could be formed by natural selection, though insuperable by our imagination, should not be considered as subversive of the theory. | |
| Charles Darwin | False facts are highly injurious to the progress of science, for they often endure long; but false views, if supported by some evidence, do little harm, for everyone takes a salutary pleasure in proving their falseness; and when this is done, one path towards error is closed and the road to truth is often at the same time opened. | |
| Elmer Davis | This nation was conceived in liberty and dedicated to the principle – among others – that honest men may honestly disagree; that if they all say what they think, a majority of the people will be able to distinguish truth from error; that in the competition of the marketplace of ideas, the sounder ideas will in the long run win out. | |
| Richard Dawkins | Faith is the great cop-out, the great excuse to evade the need to think and evaluate evidence. Faith is belief in spite of, even perhaps because of, the lack of evidence. | |
| Honoré de Balzac | There are two histories : official history, lying, and then secret history, where you find the real causes of events. | |
| Remy De Gourmont | The terrible thing about the quest for truth is that you find it. | |
| Michel De Montaigne | If falsehood, like truth, had but one face, we would be more on equal terms. For we would consider the contrary of what the liar said to be certain. But the opposite of truth has a hundred thousand faces and an infinite field. | |
| Michel de Montaigne | If falsehood like truth had only one face, we would be in better shape. For we would take as certain the opposite of what the liar said. But the reverse of truth has a hundred thousand shapes and a limitless field. | |
| Michel De Montaigne | I see men ordinarily more eager to discover a reason for things than to find out whether things are so. | |
| Michel de Montaigne | He who is not sure of his memory, should not undertake the trade of lying. | |
| Charles-Louis de Secondat | What orators lack in depth they make up for in length. | |
| Vittorio de Sica | Moral indignation is in most cases 2% moral, 48% indignation and 50% envy. | |
| Miguel de Unamuno | Those who believe that they believe in God, but without passion in their hearts, without anguish in mind, without uncertainty, without doubt, without an element of despair even in their consolation, believe only in the God idea, not God Himself. | |
| Judge Braswell Dean | This monkey mythology of Darwin is the cause of permissiveness, promiscuity, prophylactics, perversions, pregnancies, abortions, pornotherapy, pollution, poisoning and proliferation of crimes of all types. | |
| Michael Deaver | The media I've had a lot to do with is lazy. We fed them and they ate it every day. | |
| Daniel Dennett | There's nothing I like less than bad arguments for a view that I hold dear. | |
| Rene Descartes | If you would be a real seeker after truth, it is necessary that at least once in your life you doubt, as far as possible, all things. | |
| Sir James Dewar | Minds are like parachutes. They only function when they are open. | |
| John Dewey | The only freedom that is of enduring importance is the freedom of intelligence, that is to say, freedom of observation and of judgment, exercised in behalf of purposes that are intrinsically worth while. The commonest mistake made about freedom is, I think, to identify it with freedom of movement, or, with the external or physical side of activity. | |
| John Dewey | Mankind likes to think in terms of extreme opposites. It is given to formulating its beliefs in terms of Either/Ors, between which it recognizes no intermediate possibilities. | |
| Emily Dickinson | Truth is so rare that it is delightful to tell it. | |
| Benjamin Disraeli | There are three kinds of lies: Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics. | |
| Benjamin Disraeli | Truth travels slowly, but it will reach even you in time. | |
| Norman Dorsen | Free speech is essential to education, especially to a liberal education, which encourages the search for truths in art and science. If expression is restricted, the range of inquiry is also curtailed... The beneficiaries of a free society have a duty to pursue the truth and to protect the freedom of expression that makes possible the search for a new enlightenment. | |
| Rabbi Wayne Dosick | The reality is, if we tell the truth, we only have to tell the truth once. If you lie, you have to keep lying forever. | |
| Fyodor Dostoyevsky | A man who lies to himself, and believes his own lies, becomes unable to recognize truth, either in himself or in anyone else, and he ends up losing respect for himself and for others. When he has no respect for anyone, he can no longer love, and in him, he yields to his impulses, indulges in the lowest form of pleasure, and behaves in the end like an animal in satisfying his vices. And it all comes from lying to others and to yourself. | |
| Norman Douglas | Yes; truth blends well with untruth. It is one of the maladies of our age, a sign of sheer nervousness, to profess a frenzied allegiance to truth in unimportant matters, to refuse consistently to face her where graver issues are at stake. | |
| Justice William O. Douglas | It is our attitude toward free thought and free expression that will determine our fate. There must be no limit on the range of temperate discussion, no limits on thought. No subject must be taboo. No censor must preside at our assemblies. | |
| Justice William O. Douglas | Restriction of free thought and free speech is the most dangerous of all subversions. It is the one un-American act that could most easily defeat us. | |
| Justice William O. Douglas | The right to be let alone is indeed the beginning of all freedom. | |
| Frederick Douglass | The life of the nation is secure only while the nation is honest, truthful, and virtuous. | |
| Theodore M. Drange | Some methodological atheists formulate the principle by saying that the burden of proof is always on any person making an existence claim, since, from a logical point of view, existence claims are only capable of proof, not disproof. No one has ever proven the nonexistence of Santa Claus, or elves, or unicorns, or anything else, simply because the very logic of an unrestricted existential proposition prohibits its disproof. It is impossible to go all over the universe and show that, for example, there are no elves anywhere. For this reason, rational methodology calls for us to deny the existence of all those things which have never been shown to exist. That is why we all regard it rational to deny the existence of Santa Claus, elves, unicorns, etc. And since God is in that same category, having never been shown to exist, it follows that rational methodology calls for us to deny the existence of God. | |
| Peter Drucker | Nothing is less productive than to make more efficient what should not be done at all. | |
| John Dryden | We find few historians who have been diligent enough in their search for truth; it is their common method to take on trust what they help distribute to the public; by which means a falsehood once received from a famed writer becomes traditional to posterity. | |
| John Dryden | Of all the tyrannies on human kind / the worst is that which persecutes the mind. | |
| Abba Eban | History teaches us that men and nations only behave wisely once they have exhausted all other alternatives. | |
| Sir Arthur Eddington | For the truth of the conclusions of physical science, observation is the supreme Court of Appeal. | |
| Thomas A. Edison | I haven't failed, I've found 10,000 ways that don't work. | |
| Thomas A. Edison | Restless is discontent and discontent is the first necessity of progress. | |
| Thomas A. Edison | People who will not turn a shovel full of dirt on the project (Muscle Shoals Dam) nor contribute a pound of material, will collect more money from the United States than will the People who supply all the material and do all the work. This is the terrible thing about interest. | |
| David Edwards | The modern susceptibility to conformity and obedience to authority indicates that the truth endorsed by authority is likely to be accepted as such by a majority of the people. | |
| Albert Einstein | Unthinking respect for authority is the greatest enemy of truth. | |
| Albert Einstein | As a child I received instruction both in the Bible and in the Talmud. I am a Jew, but I am enthralled by the luminous figure of the Nazarene.... No one can read the Gospels without feeling the actual presence of Jesus. His personality pulsates in every word. No myth is filled with such life. | |
| Albert Einstein | The most incomprehensible thing about the world is that it is comprehensible. | |
| Albert Einstein | The important thing is never to stop questioning. | |
| Albert Einstein | As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain; and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality. | |
| Albert Einstein | Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler. | |
| Albert Einstein | The restriction of knowledge to an elite group destroys the spirit of the society and leads to its intellectual impoverishment. | |
| Albert Einstein | Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds. | |
| Albert Einstein | To be sure, the doctrine of a personal God interfering with natural events could never be refuted, in the real sense, by science, for this doctrine can always take refuge in those domains in which scientific knowledge has not yet been able to set foot. But I am persuaded that such behavior on the part of the representatives of religion would not only be unworthy but also fatal. For a doctrine which is able to maintain itself not in clear light, but only in the dark, will of necessity lose its effect on mankind, with incalculable harm to human progress. | |
| Albert Einstein | Great spirits have always found violent opposition from mediocrities. The latter cannot understand it when a man does not thoughtlessly submit to hereditary prejudices but honestly and courageously uses his intelligence. | |
| Albert Einstein | By academic freedom I understand the right to search for truth and to publish and teach what one holds to be true. This right implies also a duty; one must not conceal any part of what one has recognized to be true. | |
| Albert Einstein | The further the spiritual evolution of mankind advances, the more certain it seems to me that the path to genuine religiosity does not lie through the fear of life, and the fear of death, and blind faith, but through striving after rational knowledge. | |
| Albert Einstein | All religions, arts and sciences are branches of the same tree. All these aspirations are directed toward ennobling man's life, lifting it from the sphere of mere physical existence and leading the individual towards freedom. | |
| Albert Einstein | It gives me great pleasure indeed to see the stubbornness of an incorrigible nonconformist warmly acclaimed. | |
| Albert Einstein | I have never looked upon ease and happiness as ends in themselves - such an ethical basis I call more proper for a herd of swine. The ideals which have lighted me on my way and time after time given me new courage to face life cheerfully, have been Truth, Goodness, and Beauty. | |
| Albert Einstein | Imagination is more important than knowledge. | |
| Albert Einstein | Few people are capable of expressing with equanimity opinions that differ from the prejudices of their social environment. Most people are even incapable of forming such opinions. | |
| Dwight D. Eisenhower | It is an ancient truth that freedom cannot be legislated into existence, so it is no less obvious that freedom cannot be censored into existence. And any who act as if freedom’s defenses are found in suppression and suspicion and fear confess a doctrine that is alien to America. | |
| Ralph Waldo Emerson | The highest compact we can make with our fellow is - "Let there be truth between us two forevermore." | |
| Ralph Waldo Emerson | Nothing astonishes men so much as common sense and plain dealing. | |
| Ralph Waldo Emerson | A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds,
adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. | |
| Thomas I. Emerson | Every man – in the development of his own personality – has the right to form his own beliefs and opinions. Hence, suppression of belief, opinion and expression is an affront to the dignity of man, a negation of man’s essential nature. | |
| Quintus Ennius | That is true liberty, which bears a pure and firm breast. | |
| Desiderius Erasmus | In the country of the blind the one-eyed man is king. | |
| Stephanie Ericsson | When somebody lies, somebody loses. | |
| Thomas Erskine | When men can freely communicate their thoughts and their sufferings, real or imagined, their passions spend themselves in air, like gunpowder scattered upon the surface – but pent up by terrors, they work unseen, burst forth in a moment, and destroy everything in its course. Let reason be opposed to reason, and argument to argument, and every good government will be safe. | |
| Thomas Erskine | The liberty of the press would be an empty sound, and no man would venture to write on any subject, however, pure his purpose, without an attorney at one elbow and a counsel at the other. From minds thus subdued by the fear of punishment, there could issue no works of genius to expand the empire of human reason. | |
| Thomas Erskine | What is the fairest fruit of the English Tree of Liberty? The security of our rights and of the law, and that no man shall be brought to trial where there is a prejudice against him. | |
| Bergan Evans | The civilized man has a moral obligation to be skeptical, to demand the credentials of all statements that claim to be facts. | |
| Felson | To steal ideas from one person is plagiarism; to steal from many is research. | |
| Johann Gottlieb Fichte | You thus have no rights at all over our freedom of thought, you princes; no jurisdiction over that which is true or false; no right to determine the objects of our inquiry or to set limits to it; no right to hinder us from communicating the results, whether they be true or false, to whomever or however we wish. | |
| Phillip Finch | A criminal trial is not a search for truth. It is much too circumscribed for that. Rather, a trial is a formalized contest for the hearts and minds of a panel of twelve. It is a quest for a verdict in which information is selected and screened (we can almost say “processed”) before it is allowed to reach jurors. | |
| Anatole France | If a million people say a foolish thing, it is still a foolish thing. | |
| Jerome D. Frank | Increasingly constructive doubt is the sign of advancing civilization. | |
| Felix Frankfurter | Freedom of expression is the well-spring of our civilization...
The history of civilization is in considerable measure
the displacement of error which once held sway
as official truth by beliefs which in turn have yielded to other truths.
Therefore the liberty of man to search for truth
ought not to be fettered, no matter what orthodoxies he may challenge. | |
| Felix Frankfurter | Liberty of thought soon shrivels without freedom of expression. Nor can truth be pursued in an atmosphere hostile to the endeavor or under dangers which are hazarded only by heroes. | |
| Benjamin Franklin | As to Jesus of Nazareth, my opinion of whom you particularly desire, I think the system of Morals and his Religion, as he left them to us, the best the World ever saw or is likely to see; but I apprehend it has received various corrupting Changes; and I have, with most of the present Dissenters in England, some doubts as to his divinity. | |
| Benjamin Franklin | Printers are educated in the Belief, that when Men differ in Opinion, both sides ought equally to have the Advantage of being heard by the Public; and that when Truth and Error have fair Play, the former is always an overmatch for the latter: Hence [printers] cheerfully serve all contending Writers that pay them well, without regarding on which side they are of the Question in Dispute. | |
| Benjamin Franklin | Our Constitution is in actual operation; everything appears to promise that it will last; but in this world
nothing is certain but death and taxes. | |
| Frederick the Great | The truth is always the strongest argument. | |
| Frederick the Great | The greatest and noblest pleasure which men can have in this world is to discover new truths; and the next is to shake off old prejudices. | |
| Maurice Freehill | Who is more foolish, the child afraid of the dark or the man afraid of the light? | |
| Sigmund Freud | Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. | |
| Milton Friedman | I'm in favor of legalizing drugs. According to my value system, if people want to kill themselves, they have every right to do so. Most of the harm that comes from drugs is because they are illegal. | |
| Erich Fromm | If faith cannot be reconciled with rational thinking, it has to be eliminated as an anachronistic remnant of earlier stages of culture and replaced by science dealing with facts and theories which are intelligible and can be validated. | |
| Robert Frost | A jury consists of twelve persons chosen to decide who has the better lawyer. | |
| Robert Frost | Most of the change we think we see in life is due to truths being in and out of favor. | |
| Robert Frost | A civilized society is one which tolerates eccentricity to the point of doubtful sanity. | |
| James Anthony Froude | English character and English freedom depend comparatively little on
the form which the Constitution assumes at Westminster. A centralised
democracy may be as tyrannical as an absolute monarch; and if the vigour
of the nation is to continue unimpaired, each individual, each family,
each district, must preserve as far as possible its independence, its
self-completeness, its powers and its privilege to manage its own
affairs and think its own thoughts. | |
| John Kenneth Galbraith | The study of money, above all other fields in economics, is one in which complexity is used to disguise truth or to evade truth, not to reveal it. | |
| John Kenneth Galbraith | The study of money, above all other fields in economics, is one in which complexity is used to disguise truth or to evade truth, not to reveal it. The process by which banks create money is so simple the mind is repelled. With something so important, a deeper mystery seems only decent. | |
| Galileo Galilei | All truths are easy to understand once they are discovered; the point is to discover them. | |
| Galileo Galilei | In questions of science the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual. | |
| Galileo Galilei | I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use. | |
| Mahatma Mohandas K. Gandhi | Non-violent resistance implies the very opposite of weakness. Defiance combined with non-retaliatory acceptance of repression from one's opponents is active, not passive. It requires strength, and there is nothing automatic or intuitive about the resoluteness required for using non-violent methods in political struggle and the quest for Truth. | |
| Mahatma Mohandas K. Gandhi | Truth resides in every human heart, and one has to search for it there, and to be guided by truth as one sees it.
But no one has a right to coerce others to act according to his own view of truth. | |
| Mahatma Mohandas K. Gandhi | Truth never damages a cause that is just. | |
| James A. Garfield | Liberty is no negation. It is a substantive, tangible reality. | |
| James A. Garfield | I love agitation and investigation and glory in defending unpopular truth against popular error. | |
| Stanley Garn | If the aborigine drafted an IQ test, all of Western civilization would presumably flunk it. | |
| Carl Friedrich Gauss | If others would but reflect on mathematical truths as deeply and as continuously as I have, they would make my discoveries. | |
| Jean Genet | Power may be at the end of a gun, but sometimes it's also at the end of the shadow or the image of a gun. | |
| Henry George | He who sees the truth, let him proclaim it,
without asking who is for it or who is against it. | |
| Henry George | He who sees the truth, let him proclaim it, without asking who is for it or who is against it. | |
| Anne Louise Germaine de Stael | Search for the truth is the noblest occupation of man; its publication is a duty. | |
| Edward Gibbon | Whenever the offence inspires less horror than the punishment, the rigour of penal law is obliged to give way to the common feelings of mankind. | |
| Khalil Gibran | Doubt is a pain too lonely to know that faith is his twin brother. | |
| Khalil Gibran | If it’s a despot you would dethrone, see first that his throne erected within you is destroyed. | |
| Khalil Gibran | He who does not prefer exile to slavery is not free by any measure of freedom, truth or duty. | |
| Andre Gide | Believe those who are seeking the truth. Doubt those who find it. | |
| Brendan Gill | Not a shred of evidence exists in favor of the idea that life is serious. | |
| John Gilmore | Truth: the most deadly weapon ever discovered by humanity. Capable of destroying entire perceptual sets, cultures, and realities. Outlawed by all governments everywhere. Possession is normally punishable by death. | |
| Nikki Giovanni | In the name of peace They waged the wars Ain't they got no shame | |
| Johann Wolfgang von Goethe | All truly wise thoughts have been thought already thousands of times; but to make them truly ours, we must think them over again honestly, till they take root in our personal experience. | |
| Johann Wolfgang von Goethe | Some books seem to have been written not to teach us anything, but to let us know that the author has known something. | |
| Johann Wolfgang von Goethe | The main thing is to have a soul that loves the truth and harbours it where he finds it. And another thing: truth requires constant repetition, because error is being preached about us all the time, and not only by isolated individuals but by the masses. In the newspapers and encyclopedias, in schools and universities, everywhere error rides high and basks in the consciousness of having the majority on its side. | |
| Bobcat Goldthwait | America's one of the finest countries anyone ever stole. | |
| Goya | Fantasy, abandoned by reason, produces impossible monsters; united with it, she is the mother of the arts and the origin of marvels. | |
| Katharine Graham | Truth and news are not the same thing. | |
| Graham Greene | Heresy is only another word for freedom of thought. | |
| A. Whitney Griswold | Books won’t stay banned. They won’t burn. Ideas won’t go to jail. In the long run of history, the censor and the inquisitor have always lost. The only sure weapon against bad ideas is better ideas. The source of better ideas is wisdom. | |
| Alexander Haig | That's not a lie, it's a terminological inexactitude. | |
| Alexander Haig | The loss of candor is grievous, and in my opinion it may yet prove to be mortal, because if we cannot discuss our problems in plain speech that describes reality, it is unlikely that we will be able to solve them. | |
| Bernhard Haisch | Advances are made by answering questions. Discoveries are made by questioning answers. | |
| Robert Hall | To render the magistrate a judge of truth, and engage his authority in the suppression of opinions, shews an inattention to the nature and designs of political liberty. | |
| Judge Learned Hand | Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there, no Constitution, no court, can even do much to help it. | |
| Sydney J. Harris | Nobody can be so amusingly arrogant as a young man who has just discovered an old idea and thinks it is his own. | |
| Sydney J. Harris | We have not passed that subtle line between childhood and adulthood until we move from the passive voice to the active voice -- that is, until we have stopped saying, "It got lost," and say, "I lost it. | |
| B. H. Liddell Hart | The profoundest truth of war is that the issue of battle is usually decided in the minds of the opposing commanders, not in the bodies of their men. | |
| Caryl Parker Haskins | A society committed to the search for truth must give protection to, and set a high value upon, the independent and original mind, however angular, however rasping, however, socially unpleasant it may be; for it is upon such minds in large measure, that the effective search for truth depends. | |
| Vaclav Havel | Lying can never save us from another lie. | |
| Nathaniel Hawthorne | No man, for any considerable period,
can wear one face to himself and another to the multitude,
without finally getting bewildered as to which one is true. | |
| Friedrich August von Hayek | Ever since the beginning of modern science, the best minds have recognized that "the range of acknowledged ignorance will grow with the advance of science." Unfortunately, the popular effect of this scientific advance has been a belief, seemingly shared by many scientists, that the range of our ignorance is steadily diminishing and that we can therefore aim at more comprehensive and deliberate control of all human activities. It is for this reason that those intoxicated by the advance of knowledge so often become the enemies of freedom. | |
| Friedrich August von Hayek | The ultimate decision about what is accepted as right and wrong will be made not by individual human wisdom but by the disappearance of the groups that have adhered to the "wrong" beliefs. | |
| Friedrich August von Hayek | It is only because the majority opinion will always be opposed by some that our knowledge and understanding progress. In the process by which opinion is formed, it is very probable that, by the time any view becomes a majority view, it is no longer the best view: somebody will already have advanced beyond the point which the majority have reached. It is because we do not yet know which of the many competing new opinions will prove itself the best that we wait until it has gained sufficient support. | |
| Steven F. Hayward | Causes that live by politics, die by politics. | |
| William Hazlitt | The only vice
that can not be forgiven
is hypocrisy. | |
| Justice Heath | Fraud may consist as well in the suppression of what is true as in the representation of what is false. If a man professing to answer a question, select those facts only which are likely to give a credit to the person of whom he speaks, and keep back the rest, he is a more artful knave than he who tells a direct falsehood. | |
| Simon Heffer | This is, in theory, still a free country, but our politically correct, censorious times are such that many of us tremble to give vent to perfectly acceptable views for fear of condemnation. Freedom of speech is thereby imperiled, big questions go undebated, and great lies become accepted, unequivocally as great truths. | |
| Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel | The history of the world is none other than the progress of the consciousness of freedom. | |
| Robert A. Heinlein | Secrecy is the beginning of tyranny. | |
| Heisenberg | There are things that are so serious that you can only joke about them. | |
| Claude-Adrien Helvetius | To limit the press is to insult a nation; to prohibit reading of certain books is to declare the inhabitants to be either fools or knaves. | |
| O. Henry | There is no well-defined boundary between honesty and dishonesty. The frontiers of one blend with the outside limits of the other, and he who attempts to tread this dangerous ground may be sometimes in one domain and sometimes in the other. | |
| Patrick Henry | We are apt to shut our eyes against a painful truth...
For my part, I am willing to know the whole truth;
to know the worst; and to provide for it. | |
| Patrick Henry | It is natural to man to indulge in the illusions of hope. We are apt to shut our eyes against a painful truth, and listen to the song of that siren, till she transforms us into beasts. Is this the part of wise men, engaged in a great and arduous struggle for liberty? Are we disposed to be of the number of those who, having eyes, see not, and having ears, hear not, the things which so nearly concern their temporal salvation? For my part, whatever anguish of spirit it may cost, I am willing to know the whole truth; to know the worst and provide for it. | |
| Patrick Henry | I have but one lamp by which my feet are guided, and that is the lamp of experience. I know of no way of judging the future but by the past. | |
| Patrick Henry | We are apt to shut our eyes against a painful truth...
For my part, I am willing to know the whole truth;
to know the worst; and to provide for it. | |
| Heraclitus | Whosoever wishes to know about the world
must learn about it in its particular details.
Knowledge is not intelligence.
In searching for the truth be ready for the unexpected.
Change alone is unchanging.
The same road goes both up and down.
The beginning of a circle is also its end.
Not I, but the world says it: all is one.
And yet everything comes in season. | |
| Auberon Herbert | It is not laissez-faire that has failed. That would be an ill day for men. What has failed is the courage to see what is true and speak it to the people, to point to the true remedies. | |
| Herman Hesse | Wisdom is not communicable.
The wisdom which a wise man tries to communicate
always sounds foolish. | |
| Hippocrates | Men ought to know that from the brain and from the brain only arise our pleasures, joys, laughter, and jests as well as our sorrows, pains, griefs and tears. ... It is the same thing which makes us mad or delirious, inspires us with dread and fear, whether by night or by day, brings us sleeplessness, inopportune mistakes, aimless anxieties, absent-mindedness and acts that are contrary to habit... | |
| Adolf Hitler | The party ... must not become a servant of the masses, but their master. ... The unity of a nation's spirit and will are worth far more than the freedom of the spirit and will of an individual; and that the higher interests involved in the life of the whole must here set the limits and lay down the duties of the interests of the individual. | |
| Adolf Hitler | In the big lie there is always a certain force of credibility; because the broad masses of a nation are always more easily corrupted in the deeper strata of their emotional nature than consciously or voluntarily; and thus in the primitive simplicity of their minds they more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie, since they themselves often tell small lies in little matters but would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods. It would never come into their heads to fabricate colossal untruths, and they would not believe that others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously. Even though the facts which prove this to be so may be brought clearly to their minds, they will still doubt and waver and will continue to think that there may be some other explanation. For the grossly impudent lie always leaves traces behind it, even after it has been nailed down, a fact which is known to all expert liars in this world and to all who conspire together in the art of lying. | |
| Adolf Hitler | The great masses of the people ... will more easily fall victims to a big lie than to a small one. | |
| Adolf Hitler | What luck for the rulers that men do not think. | |
| Adolf Hitler | The victor will never be asked if he told the truth. | |
| A. A. Hodge | It is easier to find a score of men wise enough to discover the truth than to find one intrepid enough, in the face of opposition, to stand up for it. | |
| Thomas Hodgskin | Men had better be without education than be educated by their rulers; for their education is but the mere breaking in of the steer to the yoke; the mere discipline of the hunting dog, which, by dint of severity, is made to forego the strongest impulse of his nature, and instead of devouring his prey, to hasten with it to the feet of his master. | |
| Ralph Hodgson | Some things have to be believed to be seen. | |
| Eric Hoffer | To most of us nothing is so invisible as an unpleasant truth. Though it is held before our eyes, pushed under our noses, rammed down our throats -- we know it not. | |
| Eric Hoffer | Those in possession of absolute power can not only prophesy and make their prophecies come true, but they can also lie and make their lies come true. | |
| Richard Hofstadter | A university’s essential character is that of being a center of free inquiry and criticism – a thing not to be sacrificed for anything else. | |
| Thomas Holcroft | To prevent inquiry is among the worst of evils. | |
| Billie Holiday | I never hurt nobody but myself and that's nobody's business but my own. | |
| Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. | If there is any principle of the Constitution that more imperatively calls for attachment than any other it is the principle of free thought -- not free thought for those who agree with us but freedom for the thought that we hate. | |
| Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. | That at any rate is the theory of our Constitution. It is an experiment, as all life is an experiment. | |
| Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. | But when men have realized that time has upset many fighting faiths, they may come to believe…that the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market… That at any rate is the theory of our constitution. | |
| Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. | Pretty much all the honest truth telling in the world is done by children. | |
| George Jacob Holyoake | There can be no public or private virtue unless the foundation of action is the practice of truth. | |
| Homer | I detest that man, who hides one thing in the depths of his heart, and speaks forth another. | |
| J. Edgar Hoover | Truth telling, I have found, is the key to responsible citizenship. The thousands of criminals I have seen in 40 years of law enforcement have had one thing in common: every single one was a liar. | |
| A. E. Housman | The house of delusions is cheap to build but drafty to live in, and ready at any instant to fall. | |
| Elbert Hubbard | Truth, in its struggles for recognition, passes through four distinct stages. First, we say it is damnable, dangerous, disorderly, and will surely disrupt society. Second, we declare it is heretical, infidelic and contrary to the Bible. Third, we say it is really a matter of no importance either one way or the other. Fourth, we aver that we have always upheld it and believed it. | |
| Hubert H. Humphrey | There are not enough jails, not enough policemen, not enough courts to enforce a law not supported by the people. | |
| Anjelica Huston | Of course drugs were fun. And that's what's so stupid about anti-drug campaigns: they don't admit that. I can't say I feel particularly scarred or lessened by my experimentation with drugs. They've gotten a very bad name. | |
| Aldous Huxley | A really efficient totalitarian state would be one in which the all-powerful executive of political bosses and their army of managers control a population of slaves who do not have to be coerced, because they love their servitude. To make them love it is the task assigned, in present-day totalitarian states, to ministries of propaganda, newspaper editors and schoolteachers.... The greatest triumphs of propaganda have been accomplished, not by doing something, but by refraining from doing. Great is truth, but still greater, from a practical point of view, is silence about truth. | |
| Aldous Huxley | Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you mad. | |
| Aldous Huxley | The propagandist's purpose is to make one set of people forget that certain other sets of people are human. | |
| Aldous Huxley | Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored. | |
| Thomas Henry Huxley | My business is to bring my aspirations to conform to fact, not to try to harmonize fact with my aspirations. | |
| Henrik Ibsen | The spirit of truth and the spirit of freedom -- they are the pillars of society. | |
| William Ralph Inge | It is useless for the sheep to pass resolutions in favor of vegetarianism while the wolf remains of a different opinion. | |
| Robert G. Ingersoll | They say the religion of your fathers is good enough. Why should a father object to your inventing a better plow than he had? They say to me, do you know more than all the theologians dead? Being a perfectly modest man I say I think I do. Now we have come to the conclusion that every man has a right to think. Would God give a bird wings and make it a crime to fly? Would he give me brains and make it a crime to think? Any God that would damn one of his children for the expression of his honest thought wouldn't make a decent thief. When I read a book and don't believe it, I ought to say so. I will do so and take the consequences like a man. | |
| Robert G. Ingersoll | Love is the only bow on Life's dark cloud. It is the morning and the evening star. It shines upon the babe, and sheds its radiance on the quiet tomb. It is the mother of art, inspirer of poet, patriot and philosopher. It is the air and light of every heart -- builder of every home, kindler of every fire on every hearth. It was the first to dream of immortality. It fills the world with melody -- for music is the voice of love. Love is the magician, the enchanter, that changes worthless things to Joy, and makes royal kings and queens of common clay. It is the perfume of that wondrous flower, the heart, and without that sacred passion, that divine swoon, we are less than beasts; but with it, earth is heaven, and we are gods. | |
| Robert G. Ingersoll | All the martyrs in the history of the world are not sufficient to establish the correctness of an opinion. Martyrdom, as a rule, establishes the sincerity of the martyr, — never the correctness of his thought. Things are true or false in themselves. Truth cannot be affected by opinions; it cannot be changed, established, or affected by martyrdom. An error cannot be believed sincerely enough to make it a truth. | |
| Robert G. Ingersoll | The real searcher after truth will not receive the old because it is old, or reject the new because it is new. He will not believe men because they are dead, or contradict them because they are alive. With him an utterance is worth the truth, the reason it contains, without the slightest regard to the author. He may have been a king or serf -- a philosopher or servant, -- but the utterance neither gains nor loses in truth or reason. Its value is absolutely independent of the fame or station of the man who gave it to the world. | |
| Robert G. Ingersoll | The man who does not do his own thinking is a slave, and is a traitor to himself and his fellow men. | |
| Eugene Ionesco | It is not the answer that enlightens, but the question. | |
| Justice Robert H. Jackson | The most odious of all oppressions are those which mask as justice. | |
| Justice Robert H. Jackson | If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein. | |
| Justice Robert H. Jackson | The very purpose of a Bill of Rights was to withdraw certain subjects from the vicissitudes of political controversy, to place them beyond the reach of majorities and officials and to establish them as legal principles to be applied by the courts. One's right to life, liberty, and property, to free speech, a free press, freedom of worship and assembly, and other fundamental rights may not be submitted to vote; they depend on the outcome of no elections. | |
| Justice Robert H. Jackson | In our country are evangelists and zealots of many different political, economic and religious persuasions whose fanatical conviction is that all thought is divinely classified into two kinds -- that which is their own and that which is false and dangerous. | |
| Dresden James | When a well-packaged web of lies has been sold gradually to the masses over generations, the truth will seem utterly preposterous and its speaker a raving lunatic. | |
| William James | There's nothing so absurd that if you repeat it often enough, people will believe it. | |
| Japanese Proverb | If you believe everything you read, you better not read. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | The man who reads nothing at all is better educated than the man who reads nothing but newspapers. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | The whole art of government consists in the art of being honest. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | I hold it, that a little rebellion, now and then, is a good thing, and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical. Unsuccessful rebellions, indeed, generally establish the encroachments on the rights of the people, which produced them. An observation of this truth should render honest republican governors so mild in their punishment of rebellions as not to discourage them too much. It is a medicine necessary for the sound health of government. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | I will add, that the man who never looks into a newspaper is better informed than he who reads them; inasmuch as he who knows nothing is nearer to truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods & errors. He who reads nothing will still learn the great facts, and the details are all false. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with inherent and inalienable rights; that among these, are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; that to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed; | |
| Thomas Jefferson | Advertisements contain the only truths to be relied on in a newspaper. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | It is error alone which needs the support of government. Truth can stand by itself. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | Reason and free inquiry are the only effective agents against error. Give a loose to them, they will support the true religion by bringing every false one to their tribunal, to the test of their investigation. They are the natural enemies of error and error only. Had not the Roman government permitted free inquiry, Christianity could never have been introduced. Had not free inquiry been indulged at the era of the Reformation, the corruption of Christianity could not have been purged away. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | The man who never looks into a newspaper is better informed than he who reads them; inasmuch as
he who knows nothing is nearer to the truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods and errors | |
| Thomas Jefferson | Question with boldness even the existence of a God;
because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason,
than that of blind-folded fear...
Do not be frightened from this inquiry
from any fear of its consequences.
If it ends in the belief that there is no God,
you will find incitements to virtue
in the comfort and pleasantness you feel in its exercise... | |
| Thomas Jefferson | If the freedom of religion, guaranteed to us by law in theory, can ever rise in practice under the overbearing inquisition of public opinion, then and only then will truth, prevail over fanaticism. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | May [the Declaration of Independence] be to the world, what I believe it will be (to some parts sooner, to others later, but finally to all), the signal of arousing men to burst the chains under which monkish ignorance and superstition had persuaded them to bind themselves, and to assume the blessings and security of self-government. That form which we have substituted, restores the free right to the unbounded exercise of reason and freedom of opinion. All eyes are opened, or opening, to the rights of man. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper. Truth itself becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | It is a great importance to set a resolution, not to be shaken, never to tell an untruth. There is no vice so mean, so pitiful, so contemptible and he who permits himself to tell a lie once, finds it much easier to do it a second and third time, till at length it becomes habitual, he tells lies without attending to it, and truths without the world's believing him. This falsehood of the tongue leads to that of the heart, and in time depraves all it's good dispositions. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | ...truth is great and will prevail if left to herself; that she is the proper and sufficient antagonist to error, and has nothing to fear from the conflict unless by human interposition disarmed of her natural weapons, free argument and debate, errors ceasing to be dangerous when it is permitted freely to contradict them. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | Fear can only prevail when victims are ignorant of the facts. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | Our particular principles of religion are a subject of accountability to our god alone. I enquire after no man's and trouble none with mine; nor is it given to us in this life to know whether yours or mine, our friend's or our foe's, are exactly the right. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | The day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the Supreme Being as his Father, in the womb of a virgin will be classified with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter. But we may hope that the dawn of reason and freedom of thought in these United States will do away with this artificial scaffolding and restore to us the primitive and genuine doctrines of this most venerated Reformer of human errors. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | We hold these truths to be sacred and undeniable, that all men are created equal and independent, that from that equal creation they derive rights inherent and inalienable, among which are the preservation of life, and liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | Whenever the people are well informed, they can be trusted with their own government; that whenever things get so far wrong as to attract their notice, they may be relied on to set them to rights. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | God who gave us life gave us liberty. And can the liberties of a nation be thought secure if we have removed their only firm basis: a conviction in the minds of men that these liberties are the gift of God? That they are not to be violated but with His wrath? Indeed, I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just; that His justice cannot sleep forever. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | Our civil rights have no dependence on our religious opinions, any more than our opinions in physics or geometry. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | A morsel of genuine history is a thing so rare as to be always valuable. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | Let us, then, fellow citizens, unite with one heart and one mind. Let us restore to social intercourse that harmony and affection without which liberty and even life itself are but dreary things. And let us reflect that having banished from our land that religious intolerance under which mankind so long bled, we have yet gained little if we counternance a political intolerance as despotic, as wicked, and capable of a bitter and bloody persecutions. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | Among the sayings and discourses imputed to him [Jesus] by his biographers, I find many passages of fine imagination, correct morality, and of the most lovely benevolence: and others again of so much ignorance, so much absurdity, so much untruth, charlatanism, and imposture, as to pronounce it impossible that such contradictions should have proceeded from the same being. I separate therefore the gold from the dross; restore to him the former, and leave the latter to the stupidity of some, and roguery of others of his disciples. Of this band of dupes and impostors, Paul was the great Coryphaeus, and first corrupter of the doctrines of Jesus. These palpable interpolations and falsifications of his doctrines led me to try to sift them apart. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | And, finally, that truth is great and will prevail if left to herself; that she is the proper and sufficient antagonist to error, and has nothing to fear from the conflict unless by human interposition disarmed of her natural weapons, free argument and debate, errors ceasing to be dangerous when it is permitted freely to contradict them. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | In questions of power, then, let no more be said of confidence in man, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the Constitution. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | Honesty is the first chapter of the book of wisdom. | |
| Jerome K. Jerome | It is always the best policy to tell the truth, unless, of course, you are an exceptionally good liar. | |
| Jesus of Nazareth | Put up again thy sword into its place: for all they that take the sword shall perish by the sword. | |
| Jesus of Nazareth | Stop judging by mere appearances, and make a right judgment. | |
| Jesus of Nazareth | Ask, and it shall be given you;
seek, and ye shall find;
knock, and it shall be opened unto you:
For everyone that asketh receiveth;
and he that seeketh findeth;
and to him that knocketh it shall be opened. | |
| Jesus of Nazareth | And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free. | |
| Jewish Proverb | What you don't see with your eyes, don't witness with your mouth. | |
| Jewish Proverb | Truth is the safest lie. | |
| Hiram Johnson | The first casualty when war comes is Truth. | |
| Hiram W. Johnson | The first casualty when war comes is truth. | |
| Paul Bede Johnson | The study of history is a powerful antidote to contemporary arrogance. It is humbling to discover how many of our glib assumptions, which seem to us novel and plausible, have been tested before, not once but many times and in innumerable guises; and discovered to be, at great human cost, wholly false. | |
| Dr. Samuel Johnson | In order that all men might be taught to speak truth, it is necessary that all likewise should learn to hear it. | |
| Dr. Samuel Johnson | Among the innumerable mortifications which waylay human arrogance on every side may well be reckoned our ignorance of the most common objects and effects, a defect of which we become more sensible by every attempt to supply it. Vulgar and inactive minds confound familiarity with knowledge and conceive themselves informed of the whole nature of things when they are shown their form or told their use; but the speculatist, who is not content with superficial views, harasses himself with fruitless curiosity, and still, as he inquires more, perceives only that he knows less. | |
| Dr. Samuel Johnson | Courage is the first of all the virtues because if you haven't courage, you may not have the opportunity to use any of the others. | |
| Dr. Samuel Johnson | There is no crime more infamous than the violation of truth. It is apparent that men can be social beings no longer than they believe each other. When speech is employed only as the vehicle of falsehood, every man must disunite himself from others, inhabit his own cave and seek prey only for himself. | |
| Chief Joseph | I believe much trouble and blood would be saved if we opened our hearts more. I will tell you in my way how the Indian sees things. The white man has more words to tell you how they look to him, but it does not require many words to speak the truth. If the white man wants to live in peace with the Indian... we can live in peace. There need be no trouble. Treat all men alike.... give them all the same law. Give them all an even chance to live and grow. You might as well expect the rivers to run backward as that any man who is born a free man should be contented when penned up and denied liberty to go where he pleases. We only ask an even chance to live as other men live. We ask to be recognized as men. Let me be a free man...free to travel... free to stop...free to work...free to choose my own teachers...free to follow the religion of my Fathers...free to think and talk and act for myself. | |
| Chief Joseph | It does not require many words to speak the truth. | |
| Carl Gustav Jung | Every form of addiction is bad, no matter whether the narcotic be alcohol or morphine or idealism. | |
| Franz Kafka | I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us. | |
| H. M. Kallen | Persecution, whenever it occurs, establishes only the power and cunning of the persecutor, not the truth and worth of his belief. | |
| Immanuel Kant | Science is organized knowledge. Wisdom is organized life. | |
| Abraham Kaplan | Give a small boy a hammer and he will find that everything he encounters needs pounding. | |
| John Keats | Nothing ever becomes real till it is experienced -- even a proverb is no proverb to you till your life has illustrated it. | |
| John Keats | Beauty is truth, truth beauty," That is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know. | |
| Helen Keller | No loss by flood and lightning, no destruction of cities and temples by hostile forces of nature, has deprived man
of so many noble lives and impulses as those which his intolerance has destroyed. | |
| Sally Kempton | It is hard to fight an enemy who has outposts in your head. | |
| George F. Kennan | The truth is sometimes a poor competitor in the market place of ideas -- complicated, unsatisfying, full of dilemmas, always vulnerable to misinterpretation and abuse. | |
| John F. Kennedy | We are not afraid to entrust the American people with unpleasant facts, foreign ideas, alien philosophies, and competitive values. For a nation that is afraid to let its people judge the truth and falsehood in an open market is a nation that is afraid of its people. | |
| John F. Kennedy | We must never forget that art is not a form of propaganda; it is a form of truth. | |
| Omar Khayyam | Indeed the Idols I have loved so long,\\
have done my credit in this World much wrong;\\
have drowned my Glory in a shallow Cup,\\
and sold my Reputation for a Song. | |
| Soren Kierkegaard | Truth always rests with the minority, and the minority is always stronger than the majority, because the minority is generally formed by those who really have an opinion, while the strength of a majority is illusory, formed by the gangs who have no opinion -- and who, therefore, in the next instant (when it is evident that the minority is the stronger) assume its opinion ... while Truth again reverts to a new minority. | |
| Soren Kierkegaard | People hardly ever make use of the freedom they have, for example, freedom of thought; instead they demand freedom of speech as a compensation. | |
| Krzysztof Kieslowski | Why did they devise censorship? To show a world which doesn’t exist, an ideal world, or what they envisaged as the ideal world. And we wanted to depict the world as it was. | |
| Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. | Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and consciencious stupidity. | |
| Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. | The soft-minded man always fears change. He feels security in the status quo, and he has an almost morbid fear of the new. For him, the greatest pain is the pain of a new idea. | |
| Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. | He who passively accepts evil is as much involved in it as he who helps to perpetuate it. | |
| Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. | Communism, avowedly secularistic and materialistic, has no place for God. This I could never accept,… I strongly disagreed with Communism’s ethical relativism... there are no fixed, immutable principles; consequently, almost anything—force, violence, murder, lying—is a justifiable means to the ‘millennial’ end. | |
| Barbara Kingsolver | The truth needs so little rehearsal. | |
| Erwin Knoll | Everything you read in the press is absolutely true.
Except the rare event of which you have personal knowledge. | |
| Dr. Kurt E. Koch | Each person will have a registered number, without which he will not be allowed to buy or sell; and there will be one universal world church. Anyone who refuses to take part in this universal system will have no right to exist. | |
| Alice Koller | It takes a very long time to learn that a courtroom is the last place in the world for learning the truth. | |
| Louis Kronenberger | Many people today don't want honest answers
insofar as honest means unpleasant or disturbing.
They want a soft answer that turneth away anxiety. | |
| Paul Krugman | ...as an economics professor I am by nature inclined to the view that the truth isn't out there, it's in here - that usually you learn a lot more by thinking really hard about the data than you do by sniffing around for supposedly inside information. | |
| R. D. Laing | The truth brings with it a great measure of absolution, always. | |
| Charles Lamb | I am determined my children shall be brought up in their father's religion, if they can find out what it is. | |
| Louis Lamour | Beware of those who would use violence, too often it is violence they want and neither truth nor freedom. | |
| Harold J. Laski | No citizen enjoys genuine freedom of religious conviction until the state is indifferent to every form of religious outlook from Atheism to Zoroastrianism. | |
| Latin Proverb | History is written by the victor. | |
| Gustave Le Bon | The masses have never thirsted after truth. They turn aside from evidence that is not to their taste, preferring to deify error, if error seduce them. Whoever can supply them with illusions is easily their master; whoever attempts to destroy their illusions is always their victim. | |
| John le Carré | I think the greatest single enemy is the misuse of information, the perversion of truth in the hands of terribly skillful people. | |
| Bruce Lee | A teacher is never a giver of truth -- he is a guide, a pointer to the truth that each student must find for himself. A good teacher is merely a catalyst. | |
| Max Lerner | The Seven Deadly Sins of the Press:\\
\\
- Concentrated Power of the Big Press. \\
- Passing of competition and the coming of monopoly. \\
- Governmental control of the press. \\
- Timidity, especially in the face of group and corporate pressures. \\
- Big Business mentality. \\
- Clannishness among the newspaper publishers that has prevented them from criticizing each other. \\
- Social blindness. | |
| Gotthold Ephraim Lessing | A heretic is a man who sees with his own eyes. | |
| C. S. Lewis | Not to be, but to seem, virtuous -- it is a formula whose utility we all discovered in the nursery. | |
| C. S. Lewis | Hitherto the plans of the educationalists have achieved very little of what they attempted, and indeed we may well thank the beneficent obstinacy of real mothers, real nurses, and (above all) real children for preserving the human race in such sanity as it still possesses. | |
| C. S. Lewis | A little lie is like a little pregnancy: it doesn't take long before everyone knows. | |
| John Lilly | In the province of the mind, what one believes to be true either is true or becomes true. | |
| Abraham Lincoln | When a man who is honestly mistaken hears the truth, he will either quit being mistaken or cease to be honest. | |
| Abraham Lincoln | A prohibition law strikes a blow at the very principles upon which our government was founded. | |
| Abraham Lincoln | Shall we expect some transatlantic military giant, to step over the ocean, and crush us at a blow? Never! -- All the armies of Europe, Asia and Africa combined, with all the treasure of the earth (our own excepted) in their military chest; with a Bonaparte for a commander, could not by force, take a drink from the Ohio, or make a track on the Blue Ridge, in a trial of a Thousand years. At what point, then, is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer, if it ever reach us, it must spring up amongst us. It cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide. | |
| Abraham Lincoln | It has been my experience that folks who have no vices have very few virtues. | |
| Abraham Lincoln | I have never had a feeling, politically, that did not spring from ... the Declaration of Independence ... that all should have an equal chance. This is the sentiment embodied in the Declaration of Independence ... I would rather be assassinated on this spot than surrender it. | |
| Abraham Lincoln | No man has a good enough memory to make a successful liar. | |
| Anne Morrow Lindbergh | The most exhausting thing in life is being insincere. | |
| Charles A. Lindbergh, Sr. | A radical is one who speaks the truth. | |
| Walter Lippmann | When all think alike, no one is thinking very much. | |
| Walter Lippmann | The unexamined life, said Socrates, is unfit to be lived by man. This is the virtue of liberty, and the ground on which we may justify our belief in it, that it tolerates error in order to serve truth. | |
| John Locke | To love truth for truth's sake is the principal part of human perfection in this world, and the seed-plot of all other virtues. | |
| John Locke | Any single man must judge for himself whether circumstances warrant obedience or resistance to the commands of the civil magistrate; we are all qualified, entitled, and morally obliged to evaluate the conduct of our rulers. This political judgment, moreover, is not simply or primarily a right, but like self-preservation, a duty to God. As such it is a judgment that men cannot part with according to the God of Nature. It is the first and foremost of our inalienable rights without which we can preserve no other. | |
| E. V. Lucas | The truth is the only thing worth having, and, in a civilized life, like ours, where so many risks are removed, facing it is almost the only courageous thing left to do. | |
| Don Luskin | Whenever the media covers anything I know about in intimate detail ... they always get it wrong. True on the left, and true on the right. Sigh. Double sigh. | |
| Martin Luther | Peace if possible, but truth at any rate. | |
| Niccolo Machiavelli | For the great majority of mankind are satisfied with appearances, as though they were realities, and are often more influenced by the things that seem than by those that are. | |
| James Madison | We hold it for a fundamental and undeniable truth, that religion, or the duty we owe our Creator and the manner of discharging it, can be directed only by reason and conviction, not by force or violence. The religion then of every man must be left to the conviction and conscience of every man; and it is the right of every man to exercise it as these may dictate. This right is in its nature an unalienable right. | |
| James Madison | Experience is the oracle of truth; and where its responses are unequivocal, they ought to be conclusive and sacred. | |
| James Madison | What becomes of the surplus of human life? It is either, 1st destroyed by infanticide, as among the Chinese and Lacedemonians; or 2nd it is stifled or starved, as among other nations whose population is commensurate to its food; or 3rd it is consumed by wars and endemic diseases; or 4th it overflows, by emigration, to places where a surplus of food is attainable. | |
| James Madison | The advancement and diffusion of knowledge is the only guardian of true liberty. | |
| Maimonides | Truth does not become more true by virtue of the fact that the entire world agrees with it, nor less so even if the whole world disagrees with it. | |
| Dumas Malone | The fact that we became a nation and immediately separated church and state -- it has saved us from all the misery that has beset mankind with inquisitions, internecine and civil wars, and other assorted ills. | |
| David Mamet | People may or may not say what they mean...but they always say something designed to get what they want. | |
| Clarence Manion | The Declaration of Independence is the all-time masterpiece of ideological simplification. There in a single sentence of self-evident truth, the founding Fathers put into clear, easily understandable focus, the broad basis of man's relationship to God, to government, and to his fellow man. | |
| Jacques Maritain | A single idea, if it is right, saves us the labor of an infinity of experiences. | |
| Groucho Marx | Those are my principles. If you don't like them I have others. | |
| Groucho Marx | The secret of life is honesty and fair dealing. If you can fake that, you've got it made. | |
| Groucho Marx | There's one way to find out if a man is honest - ask him. If he says, "Yes," you know he is a crook. | |
| Bob McEwen | Now the truth of the matter is, there is nothing wrong with this country. Please. The message I want to leave with you is that there's nothing wrong with this country that the proper leadership won't cure. We've been here before. In 1787, the economy of our nation was in absolute chaos and as a consequence, they met in Philadelphia to form a new country, and when they did, they did the right things, and in the second State of the Union address, which was written at that time by George Washington, he said the foundations, the economic foundations of our nation are on such sound footing that it would have been a madman would have suspected 3 years ago. The fact is that the chaos that they're creating doesn't mean that America can or has to be in decline. It means that we need to remove them as rapidly as possible and get people that know what to do and America will continue to climb. | |
| George McGovern | The highest patriotism is not a blind acceptance of official policy, but a love of one's country deep enough to call her to a higher standard. | |
| Terence McKenna | If the words 'life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness' don't include the right to experiment with your own consciousness, then the Declaration of Independence isn't worth the hemp it was written on. | |
| H. L. Mencken | Once [William Jennings Bryan] had one leg in the White House and the nation trembled under his roars. Now he is a tinpot pope in the Coca-Cola belt and a brother to the forlorn pastors who belabor halfwits in galvanized iron tabernacles behind the railroad yards. | |
| H. L. Mencken | The truth is that Christian theology, like every other theology, is not only opposed to the scientific spirit; it is also opposed to all other attempts at rational thinking. Not by accident does Genesis 3 make the father of knowledge a serpent -- slimy, sneaking and abominable. Since the earliest days the church as an organization has thrown itself violently against every effort to liberate the body and mind of man. It has been, at all times and everywhere, the habitual and incorrigible defender of bad governments, bad laws, bad social theories, bad institutions. It was, for centuries, an apologist for slavery, as it was the apologist for the divine right of kings. | |
| H. L. Mencken | The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary. | |
| H. L. Mencken | We must respect the other fellow's religion, but only in the sense and to the extent that we respect his theory that his wife is beautiful and his children smart. | |
| H. L. Mencken | No one ever heard of the truth being enforced by law. When the secular is called in to sustain an idea, whether new or old, it is always a bad idea, and not infrequently it is downright idiotic. | |
| H. L. Mencken | I believe in only one thing: liberty; but I do not believe in liberty enough to want to force it upon anyone. | |
| H. L. Mencken | The psychologists and the metaphysicians wrangle endlessly over the nature of the thinking process in man, but no matter how violently they differ otherwise they all agree that it has little to do with logic and is not much conditioned by overt facts. | |
| H. L. Mencken | It is hard to believe that a man is telling the truth when you know that you would lie if you were in his place. | |
| H. L. Mencken | The men the American people admire most extravagantly are the greatest liars:
the men they detest most violently are those who try to tell them the truth. | |
| H. L. Mencken | The world always makes the assumption that the exposure of an error is identical with the discovery of truth -- that the error and truth are simply opposite. They are nothing of the sort. What the world turns to, when it is cured on one error, is usually simply another error, and maybe one worse than the first one. | |
| H. L. Mencken | To die for an idea: it is unquestionably noble. But how much nobler it would be if men died for ideas that were true. | |
| H. L. Mencken | Human progress is furthered, not by conformity, but by aberration. | |
| H. L. Mencken | Conscience is the inner voice that warns us somebody is looking. | |
| H. L. Mencken | No one ever heard of the truth being enforced by law. Whenever the secular arm is called in to sustain an idea, whether new or old, it is always a bad idea, and not infrequently it is downright idiotic. | |
| H. L. Mencken | For every problem there is one solution which is simple, neat, and wrong. | |
| H. L. Mencken | The art of politics, under democracy, is simply the art of ringing it. Two branches reveal themselves. There is the art of the demagogue, and there is the art of what may be called, by a shot-gun marriage of Latin and Greek, the demaslave. They are complementary, and both of them are degrading to their practitioners. The demagogue is one who preaches doctrines he knows to be untrue to men he knows to be idiots. The demaslave is one who listens to what these idiots have to say and then pretends that he believes it himself. | |
| H. L. Mencken | It is the theory of all modern civilized governments that they protect and foster the liberty of the citizen; it is the practice of all of them to limit its exercise, and sometimes very narrowly. | |
| H. L. Mencken | There is, in fact, no reason to believe that any given natural phenomenon, however marvelous it may seem today, will remain forever inexplicable. Soon or late the laws governing the production of life itself will be discovered in the laboratory, and man may set up business as a creator on his own account. The thing, indeed, is not only conceivable; it is even highly probable. | |
| H. L. Mencken | Faith may be defined briefly as an illogical belief in the occurence of the improbable. | |
| H. L. Mencken | [T]he only thing wrong with Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address was that it was the South, not the North, that was fighting for a government of the people, by the people and for the people. | |
| H. L. Mencken | All men are frauds. The only difference between them is that some admit it. I myself deny it. | |
| Jules Michelet | The historian’s first duties are sacrilege and the mocking of false gods. They are his indispensable instruments for establishing the truth. | |
| John Stuart Mill | If all mankind minus one were of one opinion and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that person that he, if he had the power, would be in silencing mankind… If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth; if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error. | |
| Sir Denison Miller | This truth is well known among our principal men now engaged in forming an imperialism of Capital to govern the world. By dividing the voters through the political party system, we can get them to expend their energies in fighting over questions of no importance. Thus by discreet action we can secure for ourselves what has been so well planned and so successfully accomplished. | |
| Olin Miller | To be absolutely certain about something, one must know everything or nothing about it. | |
| John Milton | None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. | |
| John Milton | There is no truth sure enough to justify persecution. | |
| Lord Rees Mogg | Governments lie; bankers lie; even auditors sometimes lie: gold tells the truth. | |
| Edgar J. Mohn | A lie has speed, but truth has endurance. | |
| Ashley Montague | Science has proof without any certainty. Creationists have certainty without any proof. | |
| John Viscount Morley | The political spirit is the great force in throwing the love of truth and accurate reasoning into a secondary place. | |
| John Viscount Morley | When it is a duty to worship the sun it is pretty sure to be a crime to examine the laws of heat. | |
| Norval Morris | The prime function of the criminal law is to protect our persons and our property; these purposes are now engulfed in a mass of other distracting, inefficiently performed, legislative duties. When the criminal law invades the spheres of private morality and social welfare, it exceeds its proper limits at the cost of neglecting its primary tasks. This unwarranted extension is expensive, ineffective, and criminogenic. | |
| Malcolm Muggeridge | Every happening, great and small, is a parable whereby God speaks to us, and the art of life is to get the message. | |
| Max Muller | All truth is safe, and nothing else is safe; and he who keeps
back the truth or withholds it from men, from motives of expediency,
is either a coward, or a criminal, or both. | |
| Edward R. Murrow | The obscure we see eventually. The completely obvious, it seems, takes longer. | |
| Edward R. Murrow | We must not confuse dissent with disloyalty. We will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason if we remember that we are not descended from fearful men, not from men who feared to write, to speak, to associate and to defend causes which were, for the moment, unpopular. | |
| Richard J. Needham | People who are brutally honest get more satisfaction out of the brutality than out of the honesty. | |
| Reinhold Niebuhr | Toleration of people who differ in convictions and habits requires a residual awareness of the complexity of truth and the possibility of opposing view having some light on one or the other facet of a many-sided truth. | |
| Friedrich Nietzsche | In Christianity neither morality nor religion come into contact with reality at any point. | |
| Friedrich Nietzsche | Belief means not wanting to know what is true. | |
| Richard M. Nixon | Sure there are dishonest men in local government. But there are dishonest men in national government too. | |
| Lyn Nofziger | As I watch government at all levels daily eat away at our freedom, I keep thinking how prosperity and government largesse have combined to make most of us fat and lazy and indifferent to, or actually in favor of, the limits being placed on that freedom. | |
| Frank Norris | People have a right to the Truth as they have a right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. | |
| Charles Eliot Norton | The voice of protest, of warning, of appeal is never more needed than when the clamor of fife and drum, echoed by the press and too often by the pulpit, is bidding all men fall in and keep step and obey in silence the tyrannous word of command. Then, more than ever, it is the duty of the good citizen not to be silent. | |
| Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez | I think that there's a lot of people more concerned about being precisely, factually, and semantically correct than about being morally right. | |
| George Orwell | The further a society drifts from truth, the more it will hate those who speak it. | |
| George Orwell | The Party is not interested in the overt act. The thought is all we care about. | |
| George Orwell | Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows. | |
| George Orwell | In times of universal deceit, telling the truth will be a revolutionary act. | |
| George Orwell | The further a society drifts from truth the more it will hate those who speak it. | |
| Ouida | Petty laws breed great crimes. | |
| Thomas Paine | I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish Church, by the Roman Church, by the Greek Church, by the Turkish Church, by the Protestant Church, nor by any Church that I know of. My own mind is my own Church. | |
| Thomas Paine | These are the times that try men's souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly. Heaven knows how to put a proper price upon its goods; and it would be strange indeed, if so celestial an article as Freedom should not be highly rated. | |
| Thomas Paine | He who dares not offend cannot be honest. | |
| Thomas Paine | Truth never envelops itself in mystery, and the mystery in which it is at any time enveloped is the work of its antagonist, and never of itself. | |
| Thomas Paine | Practical religion consists in doing good: and the only way of serving God is that of endeavoring to make His creation happy. All preaching that has not this for its object is nonsense and hypocrisy. | |
| Thomas Paine | Of more worth is one honest man to society and in the sight of God, than all the crowned ruffians that ever lived. | |
| Thomas Paine | Character is much easier kept than recovered. | |
| Thomas Paine | The most formidable weapons against errors of every kind is reason. I have never used any other, and I trust I never shall. | |
| Thomas Paine | Freedom had been hunted round the globe;
reason was considered as rebellion;
and the slavery of fear had made men afraid to think.
But such is the irresistible nature of truth, that all it asks,
and all it wants, is the liberty of appearing. | |
| Thomas Paine | Perhaps the sentiments contained in the following pages, are not yet sufficiently fashionable to procure them general favor; a long habit of not thinking a thing wrong, gives it a superficial appearance of being right, and raises at first a formidable outcry in defence of custom. But the tumult soon subsides. | |
| Michael Parenti | The worst forms of tyranny, or certainly the most successful
ones, are not those we rail against but those that so insinuate
themselves into the imagery of our consciousness, and the fabric
of our lives, as not to be perceived as tyranny. | |
| Blaise Pascal | Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction. | |
| Blaise Pascal | All err the more dangerously because each follows a truth. Their mistake lies not in following a falsehood but in not following another truth. | |
| Blaise Pascal | It is not our task to secure the triumph of truth, but merely to fight on its behalf. | |
| Blaise Pascal | The last thing one knows in constructing a work is what to put first. | |
| St. Paul | For, brethren, ye have been called unto liberty; only use not liberty for an occasion to the flesh, but by love serve one another. For all the law is fulfilled in one word, even in this; Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. | |
| Charles Peguy | He who does not bellow out the truth when he knows the truth makes himself the accomplice of liars and forgers. | |
| Fritz Perls | Our dependency makes slaves out of us, especially if this dependency is a dependency of our self esteem. If you need encouragement, pats on the back from everybody, then you make everybody your judge. | |
| Laurence J. Peter | Bureaucracy defends the status quo long past the time when the quo has lost its status. | |
| Everett Piper | Honesty demands that we boldly pursue ideas tested by time, defended by reason, validated by experience, and confirmed by revelation. We will only find truth when we place our confidence in it and not in ourselves. We will only learn when we love truth enough to measure all ideas with a measuring rod outside of those things being measured and are willing to discard those ideas we find to be "intolerable," inferior, and useless. | |
| Everett Piper | History has taught us time and again that political power always raises its angry fist when timeless principles are lost. We know that without the scale of "self-evident truths" grounded in the "laws of nature and nature's God," every culture eventually finds itself subject to the rule of the gang or the tyranny of the individual. Recognizing this, scholars of all ages have confidently given their hearts and minds to the words, "You shall know the truth and the
truth shall set you free. | |
| Plato | Wise men talk because they have something to say; fools, because they have to say something. | |
| Plato | Strange times are these in which we live when old and young are taught in falsehood's school. And the one man who dares to tell the truth is called at once a lunatic and fool. | |
| Plato | The worst of all deceptions is self-deception. | |
| Titus Maccius Plautus | No man is wise enough by himself. | |
| Robert Pollack | The freedom to make and admit mistakes is at the core of the scientific process. If we are asked to forswear error, or worse, to say that error means fraud, then we cannot function as scientists. | |
| Elvis Presley | Truth is like the sun. You can shut it out for a time, but it ain't goin' away. | |
| Proverb | A person with one watch knows what time it is; a person with two watches is never sure. | |
| Irish Proverb | Where the tongue slips, it speaks the truth. | |
| Proverbs | The simple believeth every word: but the prudent man looketh well to his going. | |
| Joseph Pulitzer | An able, disinterested, public-spirited press, with trained intelligence to know the right and courage to do it, can preserve that public virtue without which popular government is a sham and a mockery. A cynical, mercenary, demagogic press will produce in time a people as base as itself. | |
| Ayn Rand | It is futile to fight against, if one does not know what one is fighting for. | |
| Ayn Rand | The uncontested absurdities of today are the accepted slogans of tomorrow. | |
| Ayn Rand | There can be no compromise on basic principles. There can be no compromise on moral issues. There can be no compromise on matters of knowledge, of truth, of rational conviction. | |
| Ayn Rand | One can ignore reality, but one cannot ignore the consequences of ignoring reality. | |
| Jon Rappoport | From the moment the first leader of the first clan in human history took charge, he busied himself with this question: 'What can I say and do that will make my people react the way I want them to.' He was the first Pavlov. He was the first psychologist, the first propagandist, the first mind-control boss. His was the first little empire. Since then, only the means and methods have changed. | |
| Jon Rappoport | Under the surface of this global civilization, a great and secret war is taking place. The two opponents hold different conceptions of Reality. On one side, those who claim that humans operate purely on the basis of stimulus-response, like machines; on the other side, those who believe there is a gigantic thing called freedom. Phase One of the war is already over. The stimulus-response people have won. In Phase Two, people are waking up to the far-reaching and devastating consequences of the Pavlovian program. | |
| Jon Rappoport | There is an irreducible thing. It's called freedom. It is native to every individual. Sometimes it rears its head in the middle of the night, and the dreamer awakes. And he asks himself: what is my freedom for? And then he begins a voyage that no device can record, measure, or analyze. If he pursues it long enough, it takes him out of the labyrinth. | |
| Dr. John Joseph Ray | The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. | |
| William Winwood Reade | What a state of society is this in which freethinker is a term of abuse, and in which doubt is regarded as sin? | |
| Ronald Reagan | Freedom is the recognition that no single person, no single authority or government has a monopoly on the truth, but that every individual life is infinitely precious, that every one of us put in this world has been put there for a reason and has something to offer. It´s so hard for government planners, no matter how sophisticated, to ever substitute for millions of individuals working night and day to make their dreams come true. The fact is, bureaucracies are a problem around the world. | |
| James Reston | The rising power of the United States in world affairs ... requires, not a more compliant press, but a relentless barrage of facts and criticism ... Our job in this age, as I see it, is not to serve as cheerleaders for our side ... but to help the largest possible number of people to see the realities. | |
| Adrienne Rich | Lying is done with words and also with silence. | |
| Will Rogers | It will take America fifteen years of steady taking care of our own business and letting everybody else's alone, to get us back to where everybody speaks to us again. | |
| Will Rogers | Nothing makes a man, or a body of men, as mad as the truth. If there is no truth in it, they laugh it off. | |
| Will Rogers | The minute you read something that you can't understand, you can almost be sure it was drawn up by a lawyer. | |
| Will Rogers | Everybody is ignorant, only on different subjects. | |
| Franklin D. Roosevelt | If the fires of freedom and civil liberties burn low in other lands, they must be made brighter in our own. If in other lands the press and books and literature of all kinds are censored, we must redouble our efforts here to keep them free. If in other lands the eternal truths of the past are threatened by intolerance, we must provide a safe place for their perception. | |
| Franklin D. Roosevelt | The truth is found when men are free to pursue it. | |
| Theodore Roosevelt | We cannot afford to differ on the question of honesty if we expect our republic permanently to endure. Honesty is not so much a credit as an absolute prerequisite to efficient service to the public. Unless a man is honest, we have no right to keep him in public life; it matters not how brilliant his capacity. | |
| Jean-Jacques Rousseau | Nature never deceives us; it is always we who deceive ourselves. | |
| John Ruskin | Without seeking, truth cannot be known at all. It can neither be declared from pulpits, nor set down in articles, nor in any wise prepared and sold in packages ready for use. Truth must be ground for every man by itself out of it such, with such help as he can get, indeed, but not without stern labor of his own. | |
| Bertrand Russell | The argument against the persecution of opinion does not depend upon what the excuse for persecution may be. The argument is that we none of us know all truth, that the discovery of new truth is promoted by free discussion and rendered very difficult by suppression. | |
| Bertrand Russell | Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric. | |
| Bertrand Russell | In all affairs it’s a healthy thing now and then to hang a question mark on the things you have long taken for granted. | |
| Bertrand Russell | Heretical views arise when the truth is uncertain, and it is only when the truth is uncertain that censorship is invoked. | |
| Bertrand Russell | It is clear that thought is not free if the profession of certain opinions make it impossible to earn a living. | |
| Bertrand Russell | The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt. | |
| Bertrand Russell | If we were all given by magic the power to read each other's thoughts, I suppose the first effect would be to dissolve all friendships. | |
| Bertrand Russell | The practical objection to Puritanism, as to every form of fanaticism, is that it singles out certain evils as so much worse than others that they must be suppressed at all costs. The fanatic fails to recognise that the suppression of a real evil, if carried out too drastically, produces other evils which are even greater. | |
| Hassan I. Sabbah | Nothing is true. Everything is permitted. | |
| William Safire | Never assume the obvious is true. | |
| Carl Sagan | There is a lurking fear that some things are not meant “to be known,” that some inquiries are too dangerous for human beings to make. | |
| Carl Sagan | One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we've been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We're no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It is simply too painful to acknowledge -- even to ourselves -- that we've been so credulous. (So the old bamboozles tend to persist as the new bamboozles rise.) | |
| Carl Sagan | Finding the occasional straw of truth awash in a great ocean of confusion and bamboozle requires intelligence, vigilance, dedication and courage. But if we don't practice these tough habits of thought, we cannot hope to solve the truly serious problems that face us -- and we risk becoming a nation of suckers, up for grabs by the next charlatan who comes along. | |
| Carl Sagan | At the heart of science is an essential tension between two seemingly contradictory attitudes -- an openness to new ideas, no matter how bizarre or counterintuitive they may be, and the most ruthless skeptical scrutiny of all ideas, old and new. This is how deep truths are winnowed from deep nonsense. | |
| Saki | A little inaccuracy sometimes saves tons of explanation. | |
| Lord Herbert Louis Samuel | Without doubt the greatest injury of all was done by basing morals on myth. For, sooner or later, myth is recognized for what it is, and disappears. Then morality loses the foundation on which it has been built. | |
| George Santayana | Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. | |
| Jean-Paul Sartre | Man is condemned to be free. Condemned because he did not create himself, yet is nevertheless at liberty, and from the moment he is thrown into this world he is responsible for everything he does. | |
| George Savile | Wherever a Knave is not punished, an honest Man is laugh'd at. | |
| Eric Schaub | The Truth is not a thing. It is alive. It cannot be grasped. It is spoken. | |
| Eric Schaub | Speak honestly, and the truth will make itself known. | |
| Eric Schaub | If you want to know the big 'T' Truth,
tell the little 't' truth without fail.
Then listen closely to what you say. | |
| Eric Schaub | A seeker of truth is no stranger to controversy. | |
| Eric Schaub | Truth need only be spoken. | |
| Eric Schaub | The more I truly learn, I realize the less I truly know. | |
| Eric Schaub | Every party skews the facts to their advantage, and inevitably, the minority party must resort to telling the truth. | |
| Eric Schaub | The truth is more important than its teller. | |
| Eric Schaub | Some truths need to be learned from the inside. | |
| Eric Schaub | The truth doesn't sell. It is high in supply, but low in demand. | |
| Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. | Those who are convinced they have a monopoly on The Truth always feel that they are only saving the world when they slaughter the heretics. | |
| Arthur Schopenhauer | All truth passes through 3 stages.\\
First, it is ridiculed.\\
Second, it is violently opposed.\\
Third, it is accepted as being self-evident. | |
| C. P. Scott | The newspaper is of necessity something of a monopoly, and its first duty is to shun the temptations of monopoly. Its primary office is the gathering of news. At the peril of its soul it must see that the supply is not tainted. Neither in what it gives, nor in what it does not give, nor in the mode of presentation, must the unclouded face of truth suffer wrong. Comment is free but facts are sacred. | |
| Sir Walter Scott | O, what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive! | |
| Lucius Annaeus Seneca | It is quality rather than quantity that matters. | |
| Lucius Annaeus Seneca | Tis the upright mind that holds true sovereignty. | |
| Lucius Annaeus Seneca | We often want one thing and pray for another, not telling the truth even to the gods. | |
| Lucius Annaeus Seneca | Remember, however, before all else, to strip things of all that disturbs and confuses, and to see what each is at bottom; you will then comprehend that they contain nothing fearful except the actual fear. | |
| Lucius Annaeus Seneca | What then? Shall I not follow in the footsteps of my predecessors? I shall indeed use the old road, but if I find one that makes a shorter cut and is smoother to travel, I shall open the new road. Men who have made these discoveries before us are not our masters, but our guides. Truth lies open for all; it has not yet been monopolized. And there is plenty of it left even for posterity to discover. | |
| Lucius Annaeus Seneca | The cause of anger is the belief that we are injured; this belief, therefore, should not be lightly entertained. We ought not to fly into a rage even when the injury appears to be open and distinct: for some false things bear the semblance of truth. We should always allow some time to elapse, for time discloses the truth. | |
| Lucius Annaeus Seneca | Should I be surprised that dangers which have always surrounded me should at last attack me? A great part of mankind, when about to sail, do not think of a storm. I shall never be ashamed of a reporter of bad news in a good cause. | |
| Lucius Annaeus Seneca | I do not trust my eyes to tell me what a man is: I have a better and more trustworthy light by which I can distinguish what is true from what is false: let the mind find out what is good for the mind. | |
| William Shakespeare | No legacy is so rich as honesty. | |
| George Bernard Shaw | If you do not say a thing in an irritating way, you may as well not say it at all because people will not trouble themselves about anything that does not trouble them. | |
| George Bernard Shaw | Martyrdom is the only way a person can become famous without ability. | |
| George Bernard Shaw | The right to know is like the right to live. It is fundamental and unconditional in its assumption that knowledge, like life, is a desirable thing. | |
| George Bernard Shaw | It is dangerous to be sincere unless you are also stupid. | |
| George Bernard Shaw | When two people are under the influence of the most violent, most insane, most delusive, and most transient of passions, they are required to swear that they will remain in that excited, abnormal, and exhausting condition continuously until death do them part. | |
| George Bernard Shaw | The American Constitution, one of the few modern political documents drawn up by men who were forced by the sternest circumstances to think out what they really had to face, instead of chopping logic in a university classroom. | |
| George Bernard Shaw | When a thing is funny, search it carefully for a hidden truth. | |
| George Bernard Shaw | All great truths began as blasphemies. | |
| George Bernard Shaw | The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact than a drunken man is happier than a sober one. | |
| Percy Bysshe Shelley | [A]nd obedience, Bane of all genius, virtue, freedom, truth, Makes slaves of men and of the human frame, A mechanized automaton. | |
| Percy Bysshe Shelley | Truth has always been found to promote the best interests of mankind. | |
| Percy Bysshe Shelley | Power, like a desolating pestilence,\\
Pollutes whate'er it touches; and obedience,\\
Bane of all genius, virtue, freedom, truth,\\
Makes slaves of men, and of the human frame,\\
A mechanized automaton. | |
| Solomon Short | Truth never tranquilizes. The defining property of truth is its ability to disturb. Jesus only told half the story. The truth 'will' set you free. But, first it's going to piss you off. | |
| Homer Simpson | It takes two to lie. One to lie and one to listen. | |
| Richard E. Sincere, Jr. | In a free society, standards of public morality can be measured only by whether physical coercion -- violence against persons or property -- occurs. There is no right not to be offended by words, actions or symbols. | |
| Isaac Bashevis Singer | We know what a person thinks, not when he tells us what he thinks, but by his actions. | |
| B. F. Skinner | Society attacks early when the individual is helpless. | |
| Adam Smith | A true party-man hates and despises candour. | |
| Craig R. Smith | Protection of political speech advanced two important democratic goals:\\1) an informed citizenry that would be capable of making educated decisions on matters of public concern, and \\2) a free and open marketplace of ideas wherein the truth would ultimately prevail… Only through a vigorous and spirited public debate could citizens be educated about the actions of their government and react responsibly. | |
| Socrates | False words are not only evil in themselves, but they infect the soul with evil. | |
| Frederick Soddy | The whole profit of the issuance of money has provided the capital of the great banking business as it exists today. Starting with nothing whatever of their own, they have got the whole world into their debt irredeemably, by a trick. This money comes into existence every time the banks 'lend' and disappears every time the debt is repaid to them. So that if industry tries to repay, the money of the nation disappears. This is what makes prosperity so 'dangerous' as it destroys money just when it is most needed and precipitates a slump. There is nothing left now for us but to get ever deeper and deeper into debt to the banking system in order to provide the increasing amounts of money the nation requires for its expansion and growth. An honest money system is the only alternative. | |
| Solon | A half truth is the worst of all lies, because it can be defended in partiality. | |
| Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn | In our country, the lie has become not just a moral category but a pillar of the State. | |
| Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn | The simple step of a courageous individual is not to take part in the lie. One word of truth outweighs the world. | |
| Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn | Woe to that nation whose literature is disturbed by the intervention of power. Because that is not just a violation against "freedom of print", it is the closing down of the heart of the nation, a slashing to pieces of its memory. The nation ceases to be mindful of itself, it is deprived of its spiritual unity, and despite a supposedly common language, compatriots suddenly cease to understand one another. | |
| Thomas Sowell | When you want to help people, you tell them the truth. When you want to help yourself, you tell them what they want to hear. | |
| Gerry Spence | While birds can fly, only humans can argue. Argument is the affirmation of our being. It is the principal instrument of human intercourse. Without argument the species would perish.\\
As a subtle suggestion, it is the means by which we aid another.\\
As a warning, it steers us from danger.\\
As exposition, it teaches.\\
As an expression of creativity, it is the gift of ourselves.\\
As a protest, it struggles for justice.\\
As a reasoned dialogue, it resolves disputes.\\
As an assertion of self, it engenders respect.\\
As an entreaty of love, it expresses our devotion\\
As a plea, it generates mercy.\\
As charismatic oration it moves multitudes and changes history.\\
We must argue -- to help, to warn, to lead, to love, to create, to learn, to enjoy justice, to be. | |
| Herbert Spencer | The ultimate result of shielding men from the effects of folly is to fill the world with fools. | |
| Herbert Spencer | The authoritarian sets up some book, or man, or tradition to establish the truth. The freethinker sets up reason and private judgment to discover the truth... It takes the highest courage to utter unpopular truths. | |
| Herbert Spencer | Truth generally lies in the coordination of antagonistic opinions. | |
| Herbert Spencer | The greatest of all infidelities is the fear that the truth will be bad. | |
| Lysander Spooner | For a government to declare a vice to be a crime, and to punish it as such, is an attempt to falsify the very nature of things. It is as absurd as it would be to declare truth to be a falsehood, or falsehood a truth. | |
| Charles Haddon Spurgeon | Men cannot see truth, because they love falsehood. The gospel is not seen, because it is too pure for their loose lives and lewd thoughts. | |
| Stendhal | The shepherd always tries to persuade the sheep that their interests and his own are the same. | |
| Leslie Stephen | If atheism is to be used to express the state of mind in which God is identified with the unknowable, and theology is pronounced to be a collection of meaningless words about unintelligible chimeras, then I have no doubt, and I think few people doubt, that atheists are as plentiful as blackberries. | |
| Leslie Stephen | Why, when no honest man will deny in private that every ultimate problem is wrapped in the profoundest mystery, do honest men proclaim in pulpits that unhesitating certainty is the duty of the most foolish and ignorant? Is it not a spectacle to make the angels laugh? We are a company of ignorant beings, feeling our way through mists and darkness, learning only by incessantly repeated blunders, obtaining a glimmering of truth by falling into every conceivable error, dimly discerning light enough for our daily needs, but hopelessly differing whenever we attempt to describe the ultimate origin or end of our paths; and yet, when one of us ventures to declare that we don't know the map of the universe as well as the map of our infintesimal parish, he is hooted, reviled, and perhaps told that he will be damned to all eternity for his faithlessness. | |
| Leslie Stephen | Till then we shall be content to admit openly, what you (religionists) whisper under your breath or hide in technical jargon, that the ancient secret is a secret still; that man knows nothing of the Infinite and Absolute; and that, knowing nothing, he had better not be dogmatic about his ignorance. And, meanwhile, we will endeavour to be as charitable as possible, and whilst you trumpet forth officially your contempt for our skepticism, we will at least try to believe that you are imposed upon by your own bluster. | |
| Sir Leslie Stephen | Every man who says frankly and fully what he thinks is so far doing a public service. We should be grateful to him for attacking most unsparingly our most cherished opinions. | |
| Jarrett Stepman | So, what the cultural elites are doing is what plenty of other authoritarian and totalitarian societies have done in the past. They are making the cost of telling the truth high enough that a general mass of people will be afraid to declare it publicly or even privately. | |
| Adlai E. Stevenson II | It is a common heresy and its graves are to be found all over the earth. It is the heresy that says you can kill an idea by killing a man, defeat a principle by defeating a person, bury truth by burying its vehicle. | |
| Robert Louis Stevenson | The cruelest lies are often told in silence. | |
| Justice Potter Stewart | The right to enjoy property without unlawful deprivation, no less that the right to speak out or the right to travel is, in truth, a “personal” right. | |
| Justice Joseph Story | Republics are created by the virtue, public spirit, and
intelligence of the citizens. They fall, when the wise are banished
from the public councils, because they dare to be honest, and
the profligate are rewarded, because they flatter the people,
in order to betray them. | |
| Rex Stout | There are two kinds of statistics the kind you look up and the kind you make up. | |
| Herbert B. Swope | The first duty of a newspaper is to be accurate. If it is accurate, it follows that it is fair. | |
| Arthur Sylvester | I think the inherent right of the government to lie to save itself when faced with nuclear disaster is basic -- basic. | |
| Thomas Szasz | The battle for the world is the battle for definitions. | |
| Albert Szent-Gyorgi | Discovery consists in seeing what everyone else has seen and thinking what no one else has thought. | |
| Rabindrnath Tagore | If you shut your door to all errors, truth will be shut out. | |
| Rebazar Tarzs | Illusions are like mistresses.
We can have many of them
without tying ourselves down to responsibility.
But truth insists on marriage.
Once a person embraces truth,
he is in its ruthless, but gentle, grasp. | |
| A. J. P. Taylor | Freedom does not always win. This is one of the bitterest lessons of history. | |
| Edwin Way Teale | It is morally as bad not to care whether a thing is true or not, so long as it makes you feel good, as it is not to care how you got your money as long as you have it. | |
| Tecumseh | Live your life that the fear of death can never enter your heart.\\
Trouble no one about his religion.\\
Respect others in their views and demand that they respect yours.\\
Love your life, perfect your life, beautify all things in your life.\\
Seek to make your life long and of service to your people.\\
Prepare a noble death song for the day when you go over the great divide.\\
Always give a word or sign of salute when meeting or passing a friend, or even a stranger, if in a lonely place.\\
Show respect to all people, but grovel to none.\\
When you rise in the morning, give thanks for the light, for your life, for your strength. \\
Give thanks for your food and for the joy of living. If you see no reason to give thanks, the fault lies in yourself.\\
Abuse no one and no thing, for abuse turns the wise ones to fools and robs the spirit of its vision.\\
When your time comes to die, be not like those whose hearts are filled with fear of death, so that when their time comes they weep and pray for a little more time to live their lives over again in a different way.\\
Sing your death song, and die like a hero going home. | |
| Alfred Lord Tennyson | Ring out the old, ring in the new,\\
Ring, happy bells, across the snow:\\
The year is going, let him go;\\
Ring out the false, ring in the true.\\ | |
| Mother Teresa | If we have no peace, it is because we have forgotten that we belong to each other. | |
| Mother Teresa | Human rights are not a privilege conferred by government. They are every human being's entitlement by virtue of his humanity. The right to life does not depend, and must not be contingent, on the pleasure of anyone else, not even a parent or sovereign. ... You must weep that your own government, at present, seems blind to this truth. | |
| The Mahabharata | This is the sum of all true righteousness: deal with others as thou wouldst thyself be dealt by. Do nothing to thy neighbor which thou wouldst not have him do to thee hereafter. | |
| The Talmud | If you add to the truth, you subtract from it. | |
| Justice Clarence Thomas | A good argument diluted to avoid criticism is not nearly as good as the undiluted argument, because we best arrive at truth through a process of honest and vigorous debate. Arguments should not sneak around in disguise, as if dissent were somehow sinister… For it is bravery that is required to secure freedom. | |
| Norman Thomas | Dissent... is a right essential to any concept of the dignity and freedom of the individual; it is essential to the search for truth in a world wherein no authority is infallible. | |
| Henry David Thoreau | To be awake is to be alive. | |
| Henry David Thoreau | Let us settle ourselves, and work and wedge our feet downward through the mud and slush of opinion, and prejudice and tradition, and delusion, and appearance, that alluvion which covers the globe... till we come to the hard bottom of rocks in place, which we can call reality. | |
| Henry David Thoreau | There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root. | |
| Henry David Thoreau | If you see a man approaching you with the obvious intent of doing you good, you should run for your life. | |
| Henry David Thoreau | Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth. | |
| James Thurber | It is better to know some of the questions than all of the answers. | |
| Paul Tillich | Doubt isn't the opposite of faith; it is an element of faith. | |
| Leo Nikolaevich Tolstoi | I know that most men -- not only those considered clever, but even those who are very clever and capable of understanding most difficult scientific, mathematical, or philosophic, problems -- can seldom discern even the simplest and most obvious truth if it be such as obliges them to admit the falsity of conclusions they have formed, perhaps with much difficulty -- conclusions of which they are proud, which they have taught to others, and on which they have built their lives. | |
| Leo Nikolaevich Tolstoi | Hypocrisy is anything whatever may deceive the cleverest and most penetrating man, but the least wide-awake of children recognizes it, and is revolted by it, however ingeniously it may be disguised. | |
| Harry S. Truman | If you cannot convince them, confuse them. | |
| Harry S. Truman | I never give them hell. I just tell the truth and they think it's hell. | |
| Harriet Tubman | I freed thousands of slaves. I could have freed thousands more if they had known they were slaves. | |
| Mark Twain | Truth is mighty and will prevail. There is nothing the matter with this, except that it ain't so. | |
| Mark Twain | Often, the surest way to convey information is to tell the strict truth. | |
| Mark Twain | Observe, I do not mean to suggest that the custom of lying has suffered any decay or interruption -- no, for the Lie, as Virtue, as Principle, is eternal; the Lie, as a recreation, a solace, a refuge in time of need, the fourth Grace, the tenth Muse, man's best and surest friend, is immortal, and cannot perish from the earth while this club remains.
My complaint, simply concerns the decay of the art of lying. No high-minded man, no man of right feeling, can contemplate the lumbering and slovenly lying of the present day without grieving to see a noble art so prostituted. ... If this finest of the fine art arts had everywhere received the attention, encouragement, and conscientious practice and development which this club has devoted to it, I should not need to utter this lament, or cry a single tear. I do not say this to flatter. I say it in a spirit of just and appreciative recognition. | |
| Mark Twain | Do the right thing. It will gratify some people and astonish the rest. | |
| Mark Twain | Carlye said, A lie cannot live; it shows he did not know how to tell them. | |
| Mark Twain | ... if it is a Miracle, any sort of evidence will answer, but if it is a Fact, proof is necessary. | |
| Mark Twain | The history of the race, and each individual's experience, are thick with evidence that a truth is not hard to kill and that a lie told well is immortal. | |
| Mark Twain | I am aware that when even the brightest mind in our world has been trained up from childhood in a superstition of any kind, it will never be possible for that mind, in its maturity, to examine sincerely, dispassionately, and conscientiously any evidence or any circumstance which shall seem to cast a doubt upon the validity of that superstition... (more) | |
| Mark Twain | It is better to deserve honors and not have them than to have them and not deserve them. | |
| Mark Twain | If you tell the truth, you don't have to remember anything. | |
| Mark Twain | When in doubt, tell the truth. | |
| Mark Twain | Man is the only animal that blushes -- or needs to. | |
| Mark Twain | There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact. | |
| Mark Twain | Reader, suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself. | |
| Mark Twain | It usually takes more than three weeks to prepare a good impromptu speech. | |
| Mark Twain | God made the Idiot for practice, and then He made the School Board. | |
| Mark Twain | Truth is the most valuable thing we have, so I try to conserve it. | |
| Mark Twain | I am different from Washington; I have a higher, grander standard of principle. Washington could not lie. I can lie, but I won't. | |
| Sun Tzu | If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle. | |
| Miguel de Unamuno y Jugo | The skeptic does not mean him who doubts, but him who investigates or researches, as opposed to him who asserts and thinks he has found. | |
| Unknown | Do not mistake for conspiracy and intrigue what can best be explained by stupidity and incompetence. | |
| Unknown | There's a little truth to every 'just kidding'. | |
| Unknown | Integrity is not a conditional word.
It doesn't blow in the wind or change with the weather.
It is your inner image of yourself, and if you look in there
and see a man who won't cheat, then you know he never will. | |
| Unknown | Truth fears no questions. | |
| Unknown | Some people will not tolerate such emotional honesty in communication. They would rather defend their dishonesty on the grounds that it might hurt others. Therefore, having rationalized their phoniness into nobility, they settle for superficial relationships. | |
| Unknown | Always tell the truth. Even if you have to make it up. | |
| Unknown | Statistics are like a bikini. What they reveal is suggestive, but what they conceal is vital. | |
| Unknown | Always tell the truth. If you can't always tell the truth, don't lie. | |
| Unknown | Beware of the half truth. You may have gotten hold of the wrong half. | |
| Unknown | A lie may take care of the present, but it has no future. | |
| Jan L.A. van de Snepscheut | In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice, but in practice, there is. | |
| Mark Van Doren | Respect for the truth is an acquired taste. | |
| Hendrik van Loon | Any formal attack on ignorance is bound to fail because the masses are always ready to defend their most precious possession -- their ignorance. | |
| Richard A. Viguerie | The first duty of government is to protect the citizen from assault. Unless it does this, all the civil rights and civil liberties in the world aren't worth a dime. | |
| Voltaire | God is a comedian playing to an audience too afraid to laugh. | |
| Voltaire | The superfluous is very necessary. | |
| Voltaire | It is the characteristic of the most stringent censorships, that they give credibility to the opinions they attack. | |
| Voltaire | What is not in nature can never be true. | |
| Voltaire | The secret of being tiresome is to tell everything. | |
| Voltaire | It is dangerous to be right in matters on which the established authorities are wrong. | |
| Voltaire | It is one of the superstitions of the human mind to have imagined that virginity could be a virtue. | |
| Voltaire | Your book is dedicated
by the soundest reason.
You had better get out of France
as quickly as you can. | |
| Voltaire | History is fables agreed upon. | |
| Voltaire | The monster, fanaticism, still exists, and whoever seeks after truth will run the risk of being persecuted. | |
| Ludwig von Mises | There are for man only two principles available for a mental grasp of reality, namely, those of teleology and causality. What cannot be brought under either of these categories is absolutely hidden to the human mind. An event not open to an interpretation by one of these two principles is for man inconceivable and mysterious. Change can be conceived as the outcome either of the operation of mechanistic causality or of purposeful behavior; for the human mind there is no third way available. | |
| Lemuel K. Washburn | Honesty is never seen sitting astride the fence. | |
| Booker T. Washington | A lie doesn't become truth, wrong doesn’t become right and evil doesn’t become good just because it’s accepted by a majority. | |
| George Washington | There is but one straight course, and that is to seek truth and pursue it steadily. | |
| George Washington | If freedom of speech is taken away, then dumb and silent we may be led, like sheep to the slaughter. | |
| George Washington | Arbitrary power is most easily established on the ruins of Liberty abused to licentiousness. | |
| Daniel Webster | Hold on, my friends, to the Constitution and to the Republic for which it stands. Miracles do not cluster and what has happened once in 6,000 years, may not happen again. Hold on to the Constitution, for if the American Constitution should fail, there will be anarchy throughout the world. | |
| Daniel Webster | No man can suffer too much, and no man can fall too soon, if he suffer or if he fall in defense of the liberties and Constitution of his country. | |
| H. G. Wells | Heresies are experiments in man’s unsatisfied search for truth. | |
| William Allen White | You say that freedom of utterance is not for time of stress, and I reply with the sad truth that only in time of stress is freedom of utterance in danger… Only when free utterance is suppressed is it needed, and when it is needed it is most vital to justice. | |
| Alfred North Whitehead | Every really new idea looks crazy at first. | |
| Oscar Wilde | The pure and simple truth is rarely pure and never simple. | |
| Oscar Wilde | Newspapers have degenerated. They may now be absolutely relied upon. | |
| Oscar Wilde | Perhaps, after all, America never has been discovered. I myself would say that it had merely been detected. | |
| Tad Williams | We tell lies when we are afraid... afraid of what we don't know,
afraid of what others will think, afraid of what will be found out about us.
But every time we tell a lie, the thing that we fear grows stronger. | |
| Woodrow Wilson | There is such a thing as a nation being so right it does not need to convince others by force that it is right. | |
| Frances Wright | An opinion, right or wrong, can never constitute a moral offense, nor be in itself a moral obligation. It may be mistaken; it may involve an absurdity, or a contradiction. It is a truth, or it is an error; it can never be a crime or a virtue. | |
| Frank Lloyd Wright | A sure sign of a genius is that all of the dunces are in a confederacy against him. | |
| Frank Lloyd Wright | The truth is more important than the facts. | |
| Lin Yutang | Society can exist only on the basis that there is some amount of polished lying and that no one says exactly what he thinks. | |
| Frank Zappa | Remember, Information is not knowledge; Knowledge is not Wisdom; Wisdom is not truth; Truth is not beauty; Beauty is not love; Love is not music; Music is the best. | |
| Frank Zappa | Most people wouldn't know music if it came up and bit them on the ass. | |
| Frank Zappa | Remember, there's a big difference between kneeling down and bending over. | |
| Eve Zibart | Prejudice rarely survives experience. | |
| Emile Zola | Since they have dared, I too shall dare. I shall tell the truth because I pledged myself to tell it if justice regularly empowered did not do so fully, unmitigated. My duty is to speak; I have no wish to be an accomplice. | |
| zzzzAgnostic | | |
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