“Truth uncompromisingly told will always have its jagged edges.”
Source: Billy Budd
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Herman Melville 144
American novelist, short story writer, essayist, and poet 1818–1891Related quotes

Source: The Benefactor (1963), Ch. 1, p. 1, Farrar, Straus and Giroux ISBN 0-312-42012-9
"Boris Pasternak: Unsafe Conduct", p. 14
The Myth Makers: European and Latin American Writers (1979)

“But the razor edge of ridicule is turned by the tough hide of truth.”
"On Truth" in Damn! A Book of Calumny (1918), p. 53
1910s
Context: The final test of truth is ridicule. Very few dogmas have ever faced it and survived. Huxley laughed the devils out of the Gadarene swine. Not the laws of the United States but the mother-in-law joke brought the Mormons to surrender. Not the horror of it but the absurdity of it killed the doctrine of infant damnation. But the razor edge of ridicule is turned by the tough hide of truth. How loudly the barber-surgeons laughed at Huxley—and how vainly! What clown ever brought down the house like Galileo? Or Columbus? Or Darwin?... They are laughing at Nietzsche yet...

“Understanding is a three edged sword: your side, their side, and the truth.”