Quotes about the truth
page 58

“The idea of evil as it appears in modern secular thought is an inheritance from Christianity. To be sure, rationalists have repudiated the idea; but it is not long before they find they cannot do without it. What has been understood as evil in the past, they insist, is error – a product of ignorance that human beings can overcome. Here they are repeating a Zoroastrian theme, which was absorbed into later versions of monotheism: the belief that ‘as the “lord of creation” man is at the forefront of the contest between the powers of Truth and Untruth.’ But how to account for the fact that humankind is deaf to the voice of reason? At this point rationalists invoke sinister interests – wicked priests, profiteers from superstition, malignant enemies of enlightenment, secular incarnations of the forces of evil. As so often is the case, secular thinking follows a pattern dictated by religion while suppressing religion’s most valuable insights. Modern rationalists reject the idea of evil while being obsessed by it. Seeing themselves as embattled warriors in a struggle against darkness, it has not occurred to them to ask why humankind is so fond of the dark. They are left with the same problem of evil that faces religion. The difference is that religious believers know they face an insoluble difficulty, while secular believers do not. Aware of the evil in themselves, traditional believers know it cannot be expelled from the world by human action. Lacking this saving insight, secular believers dream of creating a higher species. They have not noticed the fatal flaw in their schemes: any such species will be created by actually existing human beings.”

John Gray (1948) British philosopher

The Faith of Puppets: The Faith of Puppets (p. 18-9)
The Soul of the Marionette: A Short Enquiry into Human Freedom (2015)

World, Religion, Dreams, Error

“The resurrection. I want to speak about it as we would about any ordinary transaction. In the first place, I do not believe that any miracle was ever performed, and if there was, you cannot prove it. Why? Because it is altogether more reasonable to believe that the people were mistaken about it than that it happened. And why? Because, according to human experience, we know that people will not always tell the truth, and we never saw a miracle ourselves, and we must be governed by our experience; and if we go by our experience, we must say that the miracle never happened—that the witnesses were mistaken.”

Robert G. Ingersoll (1833–1899) Union United States Army officer

Orthodoxy (1884)

People

“To tell the truth, the chariot was an astonishing sight to behold, because I had polished the steel of my flying house so carefully that it reflected the sunlight on all sides. It was so bright and dazzling that I thought, myself, that I had been carried away in a chariot of fire.”

Cyrano de Bergerac (1619–1655) French novelist, dramatist, scientist and duelist

Elijah to Cyrano
The Other World (1657)

Housing, Flying

“Sir Monier Williams, a Sanskritist with deep Missionary concerns, speculated in the same vein: "If only the self-deluded but fervent-spirited Muhammad, whose soul was stirred within him when he saw his fellow town-men wholly given to idolatry, had been brought into association with the purer form of Christianity … he might have died a martyr for the truth, Asia might have numbered her millions of Christians, and the name of Saint Muhammad might have been in the calendar of our Book of Common Prayer … Think, then, of the difference in the present condition of the Asiatic world, if the fire of Muhammad's eloquence had been kindled, and the force of his personal influence exerted on the side of veritable Christianity"”

Monier Monier-Williams (1819–1899) Linguist and dictionary compiler

Modern India, 1878
Quoted from Swarup, Ram (1995). Hindu view of Christianity and Islam.

Men, Books, World, Soul

“Many historians make it a principal part of their business to investigate and explain the unfamiliar beliefs we encounter in past societies. But what is the relationship between our provision of such explanations and our assessment of the truth of such beliefs? The question is obviously a highly intractable one, but no practising historian can hope to evade it, as many philosophers have recently and rightly pointed out.”

Quentin Skinner (1940) British historian

Visions of Politics (2002), "Interpretation, rationality and truth"

Hope, Question, Business, Past

“Go to the United States, into Europe, or wherever you can come across men who have been in the midst of this people, and one will tell you that we are a poor, ignorant, deluded people; the next will tell you that we are the most industrious and intelligent people on the earth, and are destined to rise to eminence as a nation, and spread, and continue to spread, until we revolutionize the whole earth. If you pass on to the third man, and inquire what he thinks of the "Mormons," he will say they are fools, duped and led astray by Joe Smith, who was a knave, a false Prophet, and a money digger. Why is all this? It is because there is a spirit in man. And when the Gospel of Jesus Christ is preached on the earth, and the kingdom of God is established, there is also a spirit in these things, and an Almighty spirit too. When these two spirits come in contact one with the other, the spirit of the Gospel reflects light upon the spirit which God has placed in man, and wakes him up to a consciousness of his true state, which makes him afraid he will be condemned, for he perceives at once that "Mormonism" is true. "Our craft is in danger," is the first thought that strikes the wicked and dishonest of mankind, when the light of truth shines upon them. Say they, "If these people called Latter-day Saints are correct in their views, the whole world must be wrong, and what will become of our time-honoured institutions, and of our influence, which we have swayed successfully over the minds of the people for ages. This Mormonism must be put down."”

Brigham Young (1801–1877) Latter Day Saint movement leader

Journal of Discourses, 1:187-188 (June 19, 1853)
1850s

Men, Money, God, People

“Tell the truth boldly, whether it hurts or not. Never pander to weakness. If truth is too much for intelligent people and sweeps them away, let them go; the sooner the better.”

Swami Vivekananda (1863–1902) Indian Hindu monk and phylosopher

Pearls of Wisdom

People, Intelligence, Hurt

“It is essential to grasp the incontestable truth that a Marxist must take cognisance of real life, of the true facts of reality, and not cling to a theory of yesterday, which, like all theories, at best only outlines the main and the general, only comes near to embracing life in all its complexity.”

Vladimir Lenin (1870–1924) Russian politician, led the October Revolution

Letters on Tactics (April 1917) http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/apr/x01.htm; Collected Works, Vol. 24. 1910s

Life, Reality

“Sing a song of love and truth
We’ll soon remember if you do
When all things were tall
And our friends were small
And the world was new”

Cat Stevens (1948) British singer-songwriter

Silent Sunlight
Song lyrics, Catch Bull at Four (1972)

Love, World, Singing

“The common impression regards this scale or chain merely as a "type" of organization, characteristic only of the vaster institutions of government, army, church and industry. This impression is erroneous. It is likewise misleading, for it seems to imply that the scalar chain in organization lacks universality. These great organizations differ from others only in that the chain is longer. The truth is that wherever we find an organization even of two people, related as superior and subordinate, we have the scalar principled.”

James D. Mooney (1884–1957) American businessman

Source: The Principles of Organization, 1947, p. 14-15

People, Universe

“This I must tell you, if we are compelled to go into it—your position against us, the resolute banding of the great, and the rich, and the noble, and I know not who against the true genuine sense of the people compels us to unveil the truth; and I tell you this—that, so far as I can judge, and so far as my knowledge goes, I grieve to say in the presence of distinguished Irishmen that I know of no blacker or fouler transaction in the history of man than the making of the Union.”

William Ewart Gladstone (1809–1898) British Liberal politician and prime minister of the United Kingdom

Speech in Liverpool (28 June 1886), quoted in The Times (29 June 1886), p. 11.
1880s

People, History, Knowledge, Sense

“Jesus said, "I am the way, the truth, and the life." In order for you yourself to become the way, the truth, and the life, you must embrace the whole universe and bring harmony to it.”

Sun Myung Moon (1920–2012) Korean religious leader

For Whom Are We Living http://www.tparents.org/Moon-Talks/sunmyungmoonpre67/Sm570407.htm, (1957-04-07)

Life, Way, Universe

“In truth, I swore to support the Constitution because I believe in it. I do not believe in their construction of it. It is as well known as any historical fact can be known, that the framers of the Constitution so worded it as that it never should recognize the idea of slave property. From the beginning to the ending of it.”

Owen Lovejoy (1811–1864) American politician

As quoted in His Brother's Blood: Speeches and Writings, 1838&ndash;64 https://books.google.com/books?id=qMEv8DNXVbIC&pg=PA199 (2004), edited by William Frederick Moore and Jane Ann Moore, p. 199 1860s, Speech to the U.S. House of Representatives (April 1860)

Idea, Support

“Truth cannot be taught but it is quickly recognized by the person ready to discover it.”

Barry Long (1926–2003) Australian spiritual teacher and writer

Knowing Yourself: The True in the False (1996)

Personality

“Any soldier will tell you, if he tells the truth, that proximity to death brings with it a corresponding proximity to life. After a firefight, there is always the immense pleasure of aliveness. The trees are alive. the grass, the soil — everything. All around you things are purely living, and you among them, and the aliveness makes you tremble.”

Tim O'Brien book The Things They Carried

The Things They Carried (1990), How to Tell a True War Story

Life, Death, Pleasure, Tree

“I'm a man of honour, a truthful person, a gentleman of absolute morality.”

Silvio Berlusconi (1936) Italian politician

As quoted in "La Repubblica" (13 July 2003)
2003

Personality

“[A]s a graduate student at Columbia University, I remember the a priori derision of my distinguished stratigraphy professor toward a visiting Australian drifter [a supporter of the theory of continental drift]. […] Today […] my own students would dismiss with even more derision anyone who denied the evident truth of continental drift—a prophetic madman is at least amusing; a superannuated fuddy-duddy is merely pitiful.”

Stephen Jay Gould book Ever Since Darwin

"The Validation of Continental Drift", pp. 160–61
Ever Since Darwin (1977)

Support, Universe

“Self-portraiture is something one should never get involved in, since it is wrong to lie even though one endeavours to tell the truth.”

Ingmar Bergman (1918–2007) Swedish filmmaker

"Ingmar's self portrait" (1957) as quoted in "Who is he really?" http://www.ingmarbergman.se/universe.asp?guid=4F72F9D3-43BB-405D-B42B-3D091B8FAF3A

Lie

“We cannot understand spiritual realities by scholarship alone. Although study is important, the path to spiritual realization is through dedicated, selfless service. As we offer service to others with no expectation of reward, the Lord in the heart becomes more available to us and provides for our needs—because we have removed the veils that hide the truth.”

Bhakti Tirtha Swami (1950–2005) American Hindu writer

Source: Books, Spiritual Warrior, Volume III: Solace for the Heart in Difficult Times (Hari-Nama Press, 2000), Chapter 8 - How To Strengthen Ourselves

Understanding, Reality, Study, Heart

“The verse adorn again
Fierce War, and faithful Love,
And Truth severe, by fairy Fiction drest.”

Thomas Gray The Bard

III. 3. lines 125-127
The Bard (1757)

Love, War, Faith

“God refuses to be mine,
thine or his.
For him the truth is but one
but the proud and the vain have forged many out of their desires and fancies.”

Tulsidas (1532–1623) Hindu poet-saint

Tulsidas in "A Garden of Deeds: Ramacharitmanas, a Message of Human Ethics", p. 36

God

“Ever from one who comes to-morrow
Men wait their good and truth to borrow.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) American philosopher, essayist, and poet

Merlin's Song II http://www.humanitiesweb.org/human.php?s=l&p=c&a=p&ID=20584&c=323 1860s, May-Day and Other Pieces (1867)

Men, Waiting

“Becoming a leader' has become a mantra. The explosive growth of the 'leadership industry' is based on the belief that leading is a path to power and money, a medium for achievement, and a mechanism for creating change. But there are other, parallel truths: that leaders of every stripe are in disrepute; that the tireless and often superficial teaching of leadership has brought us no closer to nirvana; and that followers nearly everywhere have become, on the one hand, disappointed and disillusioned, and, on the other, entitled and emboldened.”

Barbara Kellerman (1939) American academic

Barbara Kellerman (2012), The End of Leadership, Harper Collins Publishers; Book description

Money, Disappointment, Change

“A seeker after Truth cannot afford to indulge in generalisation. Darwin for the greater part of his book Origin of the Species [sic] has simply massed fact upon fact without any theorising, and only towards the end has formulated his conclusion which, because of the sheer weight of testimony behind it, becomes almost irresistible. Yes I have criticised even Darwin's generalisation as being unwarranted. Science tells us that a proposition may hold good in nine hundred ninety-nine cases and yet fail in the thousandth case and thus be rendered untenable as a universal statement.”

Mahatma Gandhi (1869–1948) pre-eminent leader of Indian nationalism during British-ruled India

"Generalisation", from Harijan (6 July 1940). Quoted in Teachings of Mahatma Gandhi (1945), edited by Jag Parvesh Chander, Indian Printing Works, pages 243-244 http://archive.org/stream/teachingsofmahat029222mbp#page/n247. 1940s

Books, Universe, Science, Parting

“Men are not willing to suffer the decision of things to be too easie, and therefore they mingle their own prejudices with truths, and so create greater perplexities than are Naturally found therein; and those scruples, which our selves frame, give us the most pain to untangle.”

Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle (1657–1757) French writer, satirist and philosopher of enlightenment

p, 125
The History of Oracles, and the Cheats of the Pagan Priests (1688)

Men, Pain, Nature, Decision

“The rapid establishment of Christianity must therefore have been from the conviction which those who embraced it, had of its "Truth and power unto salvation." Christianity at first spread itself amongst the most enlightened nations of the earth - in those places where human learning was in its greatest perfection; and, by the force of the evidence which attended it, amongst such men it gained an establishment. It has been justly observed, that "it happened very providentially to the honour of the Christian religion, that it did not take its rise in the dark illiterate ages of the world, but at a time when arts and sciences were t their height, and when there were men who made it the business of their lives to search after truth and lift the several opinions of the philosophers and wise men, concerning the duty, the end, and chief happiness of reasonable creatures." Both the learned and the ignorant alike embraced its doctrines; the learned were not likely to be deceived in the proofs which were offered; and the same cause undoubtedly operated to produce the effect upon each. But an immediate conversion of the bulk of mankind, can arise only from some proofs of a ddivine authority offering themselves immediately to the senses; the preaching of any new doctrine, if lest to operate only by its own force, would go but a very little way towards the immediate conversion of the gnorant, who have no principle of action but what arises from habit, and whose powers of reasoning are insufficient to correct their errors. When Mahomet was required by his followers to work a miracle for their conviction, he always declined it; he was too cautious to trust to an experiment, the success of which was scarcely whithin the bounds of probablity; he amused his followers with prtended visions, which with the aid afterwards of the civil and military powr; and as the accomplishment of that event was by a few obscure persons, who founded their pretentions upon authority from heaven, we are next to consider, what kind of proofs of their divine commission they offered to the world; and whether they themselves could have been deceived, or mankind could have been deludded by them.”

Samuel Vince (1749–1821) British mathematician, astronomer and physicist

Source: The Credibility of Christianity Vindicated, p. 20; As quoted in " Book review http://books.google.nl/books?id=52tAAQAAMAAJ&pg=PA261," in The British Critic, Volume 12 (1798). F. and C. Rivington. p. 261-262

Men, Age, World, Religion

“Well let me tell you something, I can't be nobody but myself. Ya know what I'm saying? The thing that makes the world love Flav is Flav being himself. So honestly man, to tell you the truth: it was not hard to be myself. It was real easy.”

Flavor Flav (1959) American rapper

[Casey, Cisneros, http://media.www.collegian.com/media/storage/paper864/news/2005/01/27/VervetheDishLive/Flavor.Flav.Interview-1705943.shtml, Flavor Flav interview, The Rocky Mountain Collegian, Colorado State University, 27 January 2005, 2008-03-05]

Love, World

“No-one in their senses wants nuclear weapons for their own sake, but equally, no responsible prime minister could take the colossal gamble of giving up our nuclear defences while our greatest potential enemy kept their's. Policies which would throw out all American nuclear bases…would wreck NATO and leave us totally isolated from our friends in the United States, and friends they are. No nation in history has ever shouldered a greater burden nor shouldered it more willingly nor more generously than the United States. This Party is pro-American. And we must constantly remind people what the defence policy of the [Labour] Party would mean. Their idea that by giving up our nuclear deterrent, we could somehow escape the result of a nuclear war elsewhere is nonsense, and it is a delusion to assume that conventional weapons are sufficient defence against nuclear attack. And do not let anyone slip into the habit of thinking that conventional war in Europe is some kind of comfortable option. With a huge array of modern weapons held by the Soviet Union, including chemical weapons in large quantities, it would be a cruel and terrible conflict. The truth is that possession of the nuclear deterrent has prevented not only nuclear war but also conventional war and to us, peace is precious beyond price. We are the true peace party.”

Margaret Thatcher (1925–2013) British stateswoman and politician

Speech to Conservative Party Conference (12 October 1984) http://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/105763 Second term as Prime Minister

War, People, Peace, History

“Everybody in America is soft, and hates conflict. The cure for this, both in politics and social life, is the same—hardihood. Give them raw truth.”

John Jay Chapman (1862–1933) American author

Source: Practical Agitation (1900), Chapter 1

Life, Hate

“I once thought that reason
Had led me to You,
And that through feeling
I sensed Your presence,
Caught a glimpse of
You in similitudes,
Knew You in Your perfection.
I know now that I was wrong,
That that truth was flawed.”

Jacopone da Todi (1236–1306) Italian Franciscan mystic

The Lauds

Feeling, Sense, Perfection

“However, the voice of the rationalist is a sound social reaction, it is an act of self-defense by society against the dangers of being dominated by uncontrollable forces such as a saint proclaiming a revelation or a madman affirming the products of his sick imagination, and finally a fraud who wants to convert others to his views for the sake of his egoistic and unworthy purposes. It is better to rely on the safe but modest nourishment of reason than, in fear of missing the voice of ‘Truth’, to let oneself be fed with all sorts of uncontrollable nourishment which may more often be poisonous than healthy and beneficial.”

Kazimierz Ajdukiewicz (1890–1963) Philosopher, logician

Source: Problems and theories of philosophy, 1949, p. 49, as cited in Łukasiewicz, 2016.

Fear, Imagination, Fraud

“Ardent desire for knowledge, in fact, is the one motive attracting and supporting investigators in their efforts; and just this knowledge, really grasped and yet always flying before them, becomes at once their sole torment and their sole happiness…. A man of science rises ever, in seeking truth; and if he never finds it in its wholeness, he discovers nevertheless very significant fragments; and these fragments of universal truth are precisely what constitutes science.”

Claude Bernard (1813–1878) French physiologist

Introduction à l'Étude de la Médecine Expérimentale (1865)

Motivation, Support, Knowledge, Effort

“I am now engaged on the refutation of Luther's book, which refutation you will see about September 1st. I am indeed wholly averse to this kind of fighting; but what do they think is to be done by him who is attacked with edge and point? Do not all believe that in repelling an enemy he is to be kept away, and if this is to be accomplished in no other way, he is to be cut down? And must we not oppose engines to those battering-rams which caus enot theology but faith adn truth to be overthrown, friendship to perish, and whatever is sacred and in moderation to be held in contempt among mortals? That book of Luther's, what else is it than an example of denying what you a little while ago? or a fog through which you cannot see rightly the mystery of Christ? I shall put forth nothing wild against Luther - a thing hehimself ought not to have done. Since he has done it I shall remember piety and Christian decorum.”

Huldrych Zwingli (1484–1531) leader of the Protestant Reformation in Switzerland, and founder of the Swiss Reformed Churches

Letter, July 21, ibid, p.288

Friendship, Books, Faith, Way

“The very possibility that there may exist timeless truths is a reproach to the life of laxness and indifference which modern egotism encourages. … Ideas which have their reference to the periphery or individuum, to the particular in space and time, are false and stand in the way of integration.”

Richard M. Weaver (1910–1963) American scholar

Source: Ideas have Consequences (1948), p. 68.

Life, Way, Idea, Time

“At root what is needed for scientific inquiry is just receptivity to data, skill in reasoning, and yearning for truth. Admittedly, ingenuity can help too.”

Willard van Orman Quine (1908–2000) American philosopher and logician

S.4
The Web of Belief (1970)

Help

“In order to be effective truth must penetrate like an arrow — and that is likely to hurt.”

Wei Wu Wei (1895–1986) writer

Posthumous Pieces (1968)

Hurt

“An understandable hunger for … potential clients tempts many [career counseling therapists] to overpromise, like creative writing teachers who, out of greed or sentimentality, sometimes imply that all of their students could one day produce worthwhile literature, rather than frankly acknowledging the troubling truth, anathema to a democratic society, that the great writer, like the contented worker, remains an erratic and anomalous event, … immune to the methods of factory farming.”

Alain de Botton (1969) Swiss writer

Source: The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work (2009), pp. 126-127.

Hunger, Literature, Understanding, Teachers

“Plowboy: In your opinion, what are mankind's prospects for the near future?
Asimov: To tell the truth, I don't think the odds are very good that we can solve our immediate problems. I think the chances that civilization will survive more than another 30 years—that it will still be flourishing in 2010—are less than 50 percent.
Plowboy: What sort of disaster do you foresee?
Asimov: I imagine that as population continues to increase—and as the available resources decrease—there will be less energy and food, so we'll all enter a stage of scrounging. The average person's only concerns will be where he or she can get the next meal, the next cigarette, the next means of transportation. In such a universal scramble, the Earth will be just plain desolated, because everyone will be striving merely to survive regardless of the cost to the environment. Put it this way: If I have to choose between saving myself and saving a tree, I'm going to choose me.
Terrorism will also become a way of life in a world marked by severe shortages. Finally, some government will be bound to decide that the only way to get what its people need is to destroy another nation and take its goods … by pushing the nuclear button.
And this absolute chaos is going to develop—even if nobody wants nuclear war and even if everybody sincerely wants peace and social justice—if the number of mouths to feed continues to grow. Nothing will be able to stand up against the pressure of the whole of humankind simply trying to stay alive!”

Isaac Asimov (1920–1992) American writer and professor of biochemistry at Boston University, known for his works of science fiction …

Mother Earth News interview (1980)

Life, War, People, World

“The fact that most of the time human beings put the truth about the nature and risks of the nuclear war out of their minds because it is too painful and therefore not "acceptable", does not alter the nature and risks of such war. The device of "rejection" may temporarily cover up anxiety, but it does not bestow peace of mind and emotional security.”

Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–1968) American clergyman, activist, and leader in the American Civil Rights Movement

1960s, The Quest for Peace and Justice (1964)

Pain, War, Peace, Nature

“I do not have much liking for the too famous existential philosophy, and, to tell the truth, I think its conclusions false.”

Albert Camus book Resistance, Rebellion, and Death

"Pessimism and Tyranny"
Resistance, Rebellion, and Death (1960)

Thinking, Falseness

“Dialectic generally means "of the nature of the dialogue," which is a conversation between two persons. Nowadays it means logical argumentation. It involves a technique of cross-examination, by which truth is arrived at.”

Robert M. Pirsig book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

Source: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974), Ch. 29

Nature, Personality

“If we compromise the truth for the sake of our politics, we are lost.”

Jeff Flake (1962) American politician

Speech in the U.S. Senate (2018)

“Change is the cliché of our time. It also happens to be the prevailing truth.”

Bob Rae (1948) Canadian politician

Source: The Three Questions - Prosperity and the Public Good (1998), Chapter One, The Rabbi's Three Questions, p. 3

Change, Time

“The West is in danger, but we can still prevail. We begin the struggle by standing up for our values and telling the truth about Islam. Even when we are insulted, even when we are harassed and intimidated, even when we are marked for death just for stating an opinion—we must never be silenced.”

Geert Wilders (1963) Dutch politician

Source: 2010s, Marked for Death (2012), Ch. 13, p. 217

Death, Silence

“Five score years ago the ground on which we here stand shuddered under the clash of arms and was consecrated for all time by the blood of American manhood. Abraham Lincoln, in dedicating this great battlefield, has expressed, in words too eloquent for paraphrase or summary, why this sacrifice was necessary. Today, we meet not to add to his words nor to amend his sentiment but to recapture the feeling of awe that comes when contemplating a memorial to so many who placed their lives at hazard for right, as God gave them to see right. Among those who fought here were young men who but a short time before were pursuing truth in the peaceful halls of the then new University of Notre Dame. Since that time men of Notre Dame have proven, on a hundred battlefields, that the words, "For God, For Country, and For Notre Dame," are full of meaning. Let us pray that God may grant us the wisdom to find and to follow a path that will enable the men of Notre Dame and all of our young men to seek truth in the halls of study rather than on the field of battle."”

John F. Kennedy (1917–1963) 35th president of the United States of America

"Message from the President on the Occasion of Field Mass at Gettysburg, delivered by John S. Gleason, Jr." (29 June 1963) http://www.jfklibrary.org/Research/Research-Aids/Ready-Reference/JFK-Quotations.aspx; Box 10, President's Outgoing Executive Correspondence, White House Central Chronological Files, Papers of John F. Kennedy, John F. Kennedy Presidential Library 1963

Wisdom, Men, God, Peace

“It is a self-evident truth that in a healthy community there is no place for the vicious, the weak of body, the shiftless, or the improvident. As Professor Sumner, of Yale, asserts in his book. The Forgotten Man, 'Every part of capital which is wasted on the vicious, the idle, and the shiftless, is so much taken from the capital available to reward the independent and productive laborer.”

Calvin Coolidge (1872–1933) American politician, 30th president of the United States (in office from 1923 to 1929)

1920s, Whose Country Is This? (1921)

Books, Communication, Parting

“Many people today lack hope. They are perplexed by the questions that present themselves ever more urgently in a confusing world, and they are often uncertain which way to turn for answers. They see poverty and injustice and they long to find solutions. They are challenged by the arguments of those who deny the existence of God and they wonder how to respond… Where can we look for answers? The Spirit points us towards the way that leads to life, to love and to truth. The Spirit points us towards Jesus Christ. In him we find the answers we are seeking.”

Pope Benedict XVI (1927) 265th Pope of the Catholic Church

2008, Young Pilgrims (13 July 2008)

Love, Life, God, People

“The English are polite by telling lies. The Americans are polite by telling the truth.”

Malcolm Bradbury (1932–2000) English author and academic

Page 269.
Stepping Westward (1965)

“Truth is the daughter of God, and in all her attributes God-like and eternal. Truth never depreciates in value”

Benjamin Fish Austin (1850–1933) Nineteenth-century Canadian educator/Methodist Minister/Spiritualist

Sermon (1899)

God, Daughters

“Americans need to face the truth about themselves, no matter how pleasant it is.”

Jeane Kirkpatrick (1926–2006) American diplomat and Presidential advisor

As quoted by Dinesh D'Souza in What's So Great About America (2003), Ch. 6: America the Beautiful

“My truth hierarchy: (1) health care is a human right (2) climate change is an existential threat (3) the Yankees suck.”

Chris Murphy (1973) American politician

Day 2017 Is Finally Here, Red Sox Fans" http://www.bostonmagazine.com/news/blog/2017/04/03/opening-day-red-sox-social-media/"Opening, Boston Magazine, 3 April 2017.

Health, Change

“A fact never went into partnership with a miracle. Truth does not need the assistance of miracle. A fact will fit every other fact in the Universe, because it is the product of all other facts. A lie will fit nothing except another lie made for the express purpose of fitting it.”

Robert G. Ingersoll (1833–1899) Union United States Army officer

Lie, Universe, Partnership

“The Catholic writer understands the necessary relationship between truth and beauty, which is not mere social convention or cultural accident but an essential form of human knowledge--intuitive, holistic, and experiential. Art is a form of knowing--distinct and legitimate--rooted in feeling and delight--that discovers, in the words of Jacques Maritain, "The splendor of the secrets of being radiating into intelligence.”

Dana Gioia (1950) American writer

34
Essays, Can Poetry Matter? (1991), The Catholic Writer Today (2013)

Secret, Beauty, Art, Feeling

“The defendant in this case has attacked certain beliefs, thought by the Christian world to be sacred. Yet, after all, nothing is sacred but the truth, and by truth I mean what a man sincerely and honestly believes.”

Robert G. Ingersoll (1833–1899) Union United States Army officer

The trial of Charles B. Reynolds for blasphemy (1887)

World, Sincerity

“The pursuit of truth is chimerical. That is why it is so hard to say what truth is. There is no permanent absolute unchangeable truth; what we should pursue is the most convenient arrangement of our ideas.”

Samuel Butler (1835–1902) novelist

Truth, ii
The Note-Books of Samuel Butler (1912), Part XIX - Truth and Convenience

Idea

“The calling of art is to extract us from our daily reality, to bring us to a hidden truth that's difficult to access - to a level that's not material but spiritual.”

Abbas Kiarostami (1940–2016) Iranian film director, screenwriter, photographer and film producer

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2009/jun/13/abbas-kiarostami-film

Art, Reality

“It was all very well, the alethiometer telling her to be truthful, but she knew what would happen if she told the whole truth. She had to tread carefully and just avoid direct lies.”

Philip Pullman His Dark Materials trilogy

Source: His Dark Materials, The Subtle Knife (1997), Ch. 4 : Trepanning

“There are men who astonish and delight, men who instruct and guide. Some men's words I remember so well that I must often use them to express my thought. Yes, because I perceive that we have heard the same truth, but they have heard it better.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) American philosopher, essayist, and poet

Character
1880s, Lectures and Biographical Sketches (1883)

Men

“If the Europeans are telling the truth in their claim that they have killed six million Jews in the Holocaust during the World War II - which seems they are right in their claim because they insist on it and arrest and imprison those who oppose it, why should the Palestinian nation pay for the crime. Why have they come to the very heart of the Islamic world and are committing crimes against the dear Palestine using their bombs, rockets, missiles and sanctions. […] The same European countries have imposed the illegally-established Zionist regime on the oppressed nation of Palestine. If you have committed the crimes so give a piece of your land somewhere in Europe or America and Canada or Alaska to them to set up their own state there. Then the Iranian nation will have no objections, will stage no rallies on the Qods Day and will support your decision.”

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (1956) 6th President of the Islamic Republic of Iran

Translation by Islamic Republic News Agency, Dec 2005
2005, The World without Zionism, 2005

War, World, Support, Decision

“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.”
Contra primus itaque causas pugnare debemus; causa autem iracundiae opinio iniuriae est, cui non facile credendum est. Ne apertis quidem manifestisque statim accedendum; quaedam enim falsa ueri speciem ferunt. Dandum semper est tempus: ueritatem dies aperit.

Seneca the Younger Moral Essays

De Ira (On Anger): Book 2, cap. 22, line 2
Alternate translation: Time discovers truth. (translator unknown).
Moral Essays

Appearance, Rage, Time, Falseness

“I'm not for pretending that bad stuff doesn't exist, and a passion for justice and truth is a libertarian trait. But the idea of liberty should also reveal new forms of beauty in the world, astonishing evidence of order without dictate, lovely examples of innovation without planning, and other magical things. Surely these deserve some attention too.”

Jeffrey Tucker (1963) American writer

Love, World, Justice, Beauty

“Imagination is the queen of truth, and possibility is one of the regions of truth. She is positively akin to infinity.Without her, all the faculties, sound and acute though they may be, seem nonexistent; whereas the weakness of some secondary faculties is a minor misfortune if stimulated by a vigorous imagination. None of them could do without her, and she is able to compensate for some of the others. Often what they look for, finding it only after a series of attempts by several methods not adapted to the nature of things, she intuits, proudly and simply. Lastly, she plays a role even in morality; for, allow me to go so far as to say, what is virtue without imagination?”

Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867) French poet

L'imagination est la reine du vrai, et le possible est une des provinces du vrai. Elle est positivement apparentée avec l'infini.Sans elle, toutes les facultés, si solides ou si aiguisées qu'elles soient, sont comme si elles n'étaient pas, tandis que la faiblesse de quelques facultés secondaires, excitées par une imagination vigoureuse, est un malheur secondaire. Aucune ne peut se passer d'elle, et elle peut suppléer quelques-unes. Souvent ce que celles-ci cherchent et ne trouvent qu'après les essais successifs de plusieurs méthodes non adaptées à la nature des choses, fièrement et simplement elle le devine. Enfin elle joue un rôle puissant même dans la morale; car, permettez-moi d'aller jusque-là, qu'est-ce que la vertu sans imagination?
"Lettres à M. le Directeur de La revue française," III: La reine des facultés
Salon de 1859 (1859)

Imagination, Nature

“The final key to the way I promote is bravado. I play to people's fantasies. People may not always think big themselves, but they can still get very excited by those who do. That's why a little hyperbole never hurts. People want to believe that something is the biggest and the greatest and the most spectacular. I call it truthful hyperbole. It's an innocent form of exaggeration—and a very effective form of promotion.”

Donald J. Trump (1946) 45th President of the United States of America

Source: 1980s, Trump: The Art of the Deal (1987), p. 58

People, Way, Thinking, Hurt

“The teacher thus needs a basic education in dogma and asceticism. Apologetics is certainly also good, but the former seems more important to me: ready arguments, as right as they may be, often do not have penetrating force. But she whose soul is formed through the truths of faith — and I call this ascetic formation — finds words which are proper for this human being and for this moment respectively.”

Edith Stein (1891–1942) Jewish-German nun, theologian and philosopher

Essays on Woman (1996), The Significance of Woman's Intrinsic Value in National Life (1928)

Education, Faith, Soul, Teachers

“In truth, I am more than content with my current life. I have only ever dreamed of a simple, honorable, happy, and peaceful life for myself and my beloved family.”

Francis Escudero (1969) Filipino politician

2015, Speech: Declaration as Vice Presidential Candidate

Life, Family, Peace, Dreams

“Postmodernists parade their relativism as a superior kind of humility — the modest acceptance that we cannot claim to have the truth. In fact, the postmodern denial of truth is the worst kind of arrogance. In denying that the natural world exists independently of our beliefs about it, postmodernists are implicitly rejecting any limit on human ambitions. By making human beliefs the final arbiter of reality, they are in effect claiming that nothing exists unless it appears in human consciousness.”

John Gray book Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals

The Deception: Postmodernism (p. 54-55)
Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals (2002)

World, Nature, Reality, Appearance

“The man who saw his fellow US citizens burned alive, torn apart by a mob, and hung from a bridge in Fallujah, and responded by writing “Screw Them,” is now claiming to be the messenger of truth to the citizens of the US.”

Charles Foster Johnson (1953) American musician

May 1, 2007 http://littlegreenfootballs.com/weblog/?entry=25321_Kos_on_Truth&only

“There are those who so dislike the nude that they find something indecent in the naked truth.”

F. H. Bradley (1846–1924) British philosopher

No. 88.
Aphorisms (1930)

“Women are still a relative rarity in rock bands, and studies of women's experiences with pop and rock music have indicated that girls are socialized to pop and rock music differently from boys: boys and young men tend to learn songs by ear and talk about popular music's technical aspects, while girls and young women tend to focus on lyrics rather than on equipment and instrumentation, and to resist learning songs by ear. Miki Bernyi's experience testifies to the truthfulness of those findings:”

Holly Kruse

'Girls don't have the patience to spend six years learning someone else's music. Me and Emma [Anderson] can't jam because we only know how to play our own songs. Jamming's more of a boy's thing....I think that women play more imaginatively because they learn to play while they're writing songs, instead of waiting to be technically good first.'
Quoted in Evans, 1994, p. 44.

Women, Men, Music, Girl

“In [The New Poetry] I had attacked the British poets' nervous preference for gentility above all else, and their avoidance of the uncomfortable, destructive truths both of the inner life and of the present time.”

Al Alvarez (1929–2019) English poet, novelist, essayist and critic

Page 25.
The Savage God (1971)

Life, Time

“He suspected they did it not just because of their voracious appetite for tropical hardwoods and the money that it brought in, but because of a visceral fear that someday they might have to acknowledge that they were wrong. Everything they had sought and bought had not brought them happiness, let alone contentment. […] It was better to destroy the potential source of such unpalatable truths than have them live to witness the lives of quiet desperation of their tormentors.”

Shamini Flint book Inspector Singh Investigates: A Most Peculiar Malaysian Murder

Inspector Singh Investigates: A Most Peculiar Malaysian Murder, Cap 19

Money, Fear, Happiness

“The stations of uncensored expression are closing down; the lights are going out; but there is still time for those to whom freedom and parliamentary government mean something, to consult together. Let me, then, speak in truth and earnestness while time remains.”

Winston S. Churchill (1874–1965) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Winston Churchill, in "The Defence of Freedom and Peace (The Lights are Going Out)", radio broadcast to the United States and to London (16 October 1938) http://www.winstonchurchill.org/learn/speeches/speeches-of-winston-churchill/524-the-defence-of-freedom-and-peace. The 1930s

Freedom, Light, Time

“The more any man is in the contemplation of truth, the more fairer and firmer impression is made upon his heart by truth.”

Thomas Brooks (1608–1680) English Puritan

The Unsearchable Riches of Christ

Heart

“The '80s were about acquiring — acquiring wealth, power, prestige. I know. I acquired more wealth, power, and prestige than most. But you can acquire all you want and still feel empty. What power wouldn't I trade for a little more time with my family? What price wouldn't I pay for an evening with friends? It took a deadly illness to put me eye to eye with that truth, but it is a truth that the country, caught up in its ruthless ambitions and moral decay, can learn on my dime. I don't know who will lead us through the '90s, but they must be made to speak to this spiritual vacuum at the heart of American society, this tumor of the soul.”

Lee Atwater (1951–1991) American political consultant and strategist

Source: Interview in Life (January 1991)

Family, Feeling, Soul, Learning

“Any given man sees only a tiny portion of the total truth, and very often, in fact almost…perpetually, he deliberately deceives himself about that precious little fragment as well.”

Philip K. Dick book A Scanner Darkly

Source: A Scanner Darkly (1977), Chapter 11 (pp. 185-186)

“Methinks God has punish'd the Avaritious as he often punishes sinners, in their own way, in the ver sin itself: the thrist of gain was their crime, that thrist continued became their punishment and ruin. As for the few who have the good fortune to remain with half of what they imagined they had (among whom is your humble servantl, I would have them sensible of their felicity, and convinced of the truth of old Hesiod's maxim, who, after half his estate was swallowed by the Directors of those days, resolv'd, that half to be more than the whole.”

Alexander Pope (1688–1744) eighteenth century English poet

In his letter to Atterbury Bishop of Rochester. Sept. 23. 1720.

God, Way, Imagination

“"You are certain you can keep the truth from her?"
"Sure," Ed said confidently. "I know I can."
"All right." The Old Man nodded slowly. "I will send you back. But you must tell no one." He swelled visibly. "Remember: you will eventually come back to me — everyone does, in the end — and your fate will not be enviable."”

Philip K. Dick book Adjustment Team

Adjustment Team (1954)

Fate, Confidence

“[I]t is not always wise to relate all the truth. Even Jesus, the Son of God, had to refrain from doing so, and had to restrain His feelings many times for the safety of Himself and His followers, and had to conceal the righteous purposes of His heart in relation to many things pertaining to His Father's kingdom.”

Joseph Smith, Jr. book Teachings of the Prophet Joseph Smith

Teachings of the Prophet Joseph Smith, 392 (27 June 1844)
1840s

God, Feeling, Time, Heart

“The word is clear only to the kind who on peak or plain, from dark northern ice-fields to the hot wet jungles, through all wine and want, through lies and unfamiliar truth, dark or light, are governed by the unknown gods, and though each man knows the law, no man may give tongue to it.”

Stephen Crane (1871–1900) American novelist, short story writer, poet, and journalist

"The Clan of No Name" (1899); published in the anthology Wounds in the Rain (1900)

God, Law, Light, Wine

“I believe the British government forms the best model the world ever produced, and such has been its progress in the minds of the many, that this truth gradually gains ground. This government has for its object public strength and individual security. It is said with us to be unattainable. All communities divide themselves into the few and the many. The first are the rich and well born, the other the mass of the people. The voice of the people has been said to be the voice of God; and however generally this maxim has been quoted and believed, it is not true in fact. The people are turbulent and changing; they seldom judge or determine right. Give therefore to the first class a distinct, permanent share in the government. They will check the unsteadiness of the second, and as they cannot receive any advantage by a change, they therefore will ever maintain good government. Can a democratic assembly, who annually revolve in the mass of the people, be supposed steadily to pursue the public good?”

Alexander Hamilton (1757–1804) Founding Father of the United States

Farrand's Records of the Federal Convention, v. 1, p. 299. (June 19, 1787)
Debates of the Federal Convention (1787)

God, People, World, Quotes

“Perhaps the safest thing to do at the outset, if technology permits, is to send music. This language may be the best we have for explaining what we are like to others in space, with least ambiguity. I would vote for Bach, all of Bach, streamed out into space, over and over again. We would be bragging of course, but it is surely excusable to put the best possible face on at the beginning of such an acquaintance. We can tell the harder truths later.”

Lewis Thomas book The Lives of a Cell: Notes of a Biology Watcher

"Ceti"
The Lives of a Cell: Notes of a Biology Watcher (1974)

Music

“Truth, beaten down, may well rise again. But there’s a reason it gets beaten down. Usually, we don’t like it very much.”

Jack McDevitt (1935) American novelist, Short story writer

Source: Academy Series - Priscilla "Hutch" Hutchins, Odyssey (2006), Chapter 33 (p. 296)

“To any artist, worthy of the name, all in nature is beautiful, because his eyes, fearlessly accepting all exterior truth, read there, as in an open book, all the inner truth.
He has only to look into a human face in order to read there the soul within — not a feature deceives him; hypocrisy is as transparent as sincerity — the line of a forehead, the least lifting of a brow, the flash of an eye, reveal to him all the secrets of a heart.”

Auguste Rodin (1840–1917) French sculptor

Source: Art, 1912, Ch. II. To the artist, all in nature is beautiful, p. 47-48

Secret, Books, Beauty, Soul

“There is no truth which cannot be given in fifty words; the truth is always concise.”

Barry N. Malzberg book Beyond Apollo

Source: Beyond Apollo (1972), Chapter 16

“A conflict arises when a religious community insists on the absolute truthfulness of all statements recorded in the Bible. This means an intervention on the part of religion into the sphere of science; this is where the struggle of the Church against the doctrines of Galileo and Darwin belongs. On the other hand, representatives of science have often made an attempt to arrive at fundamental judgments with respect to values and ends on the basis of scientific method, and in this way have set themselves in opposition to religion. These conflicts have all sprung from fatal errors.”

Albert Einstein (1879–1955) German-born physicist and founder of the theory of relativity

1940s, Science and Religion (1941)

Religion, Way, Error, Communication

“One ought to be "Marxist' with the same naturalness with which one is "Newtonian" in physics, or "Pasteurian" in biology, considering that if facts determine new concepts, these new concepts will never divest themselves of that portion of truth possessed by the older concepts they have outdated.”

Ernesto Che Guevara (1928–1967) Argentine Marxist revolutionary

Notes on the Cuban Revolution (1960)

Nature

“I shook my head ruefully. Police departments all over the world were identical in two respects: they all have a fondness for breaking your head open for little or no provocation, and they can’t see the simple truth if it’s lying in front of them naked with its legs spread. The police don’t enforce laws; they don’t even get busy until after the laws are broken. They solve crimes at a pitifully low rate of success. What the police are, to be honest, is a kind of secretarial pool that records the names of the victims and the statements of the witnesses. After enough time passes, they can safely shove this information to the back of the filing system to make room for more.”

George Alec Effinger book When Gravity Fails

Source: When Gravity Fails (1986), Chapter 17 (pp. 235-236).

World, Law, Lying, Business

“Mind and spirit together make up that which separates us from the rest of the animal world, that which enables a man to know the truth, and that which enables him to die for the truth.”

Edith Hamilton (1867–1963) American teacher and writer

Source: The Greek Way (1930), Ch. 1

World, Animals

“Nature utters her voice in lessons of heavenly wisdom and eternal truth.”

Ellen G. White book Christ's Object Lessons

Ch. 8 http://www.egwtext.whiteestate.org/col/col8.html, p. 107 Christ's Object Lessons (1900)

Wisdom, Nature

“I've been & am absurdly over-estimated. There are no supermen & I'm quite ordinary, & will say so whatever the artistic results. In that point I'm one of the few people who tell the truth about myself.”

T. E. Lawrence (1888–1935) British archaeologist, military officer, and diplomat

Letter in T.E. Lawrence: The Selected Letters (1989) edited By Malcolm Brown, as quoted in "The Hero Our Century Deserved" by Paul Gray in TIME magazine (15 May 1989) http://www.time.com/time/printout/0,8816,957680,00.html

People

“We learned about dignity and decency – that how hard you work matters more than how much you make…that helping others means more than just getting ahead yourself. We learned about honesty and integrity – that the truth matters, that you don't take shortcuts or play by your own set of rules, and success doesn't count unless you earn it fair and square. We learned about gratitude and humility – that so many people had a hand in our success, from the teachers who inspired us to the janitors who kept our school clean, and we were taught to value everyone's contribution and treat everyone with respect.”

Michelle Obama (1964) lawyer, writer, wife of Barack Obama and former First Lady of the United States

2010s, Democratic National Convention speech (2012)

People, School, Learning, Teachers

“The supremacy of thought (consciousness) also pronounces the impotence of thought in an empirical world which philosophy transcends and corrects — in thought. The rationality in the name of which philosophy passed its judgments obtained that abstract and general purity” which made it immune against the world in which one had to live. With the exception of the materialistic “heretics,” philosophic thought was rarely afflicted by the afflictions of human existence. Paradoxically, it is precisely the critical intent in philosophic thought which leads to the idealistic purifications critical intent which aims at the empirical world as a whole, and not merely at certain modes of thinking or behaving within it. Defining its concepts in terms of potentialities which are of an essentially different order of thought and existence, the philosophic critique finds itself blocked by the reality from which it dissociates itself, and proceeds to construct a realm of Reason purged from empirical contingency. The two dimensions of thought — that of the essential and that of — the apparent truths — no longer interfere with each other, and their concrete dialectical relation becomes an abstract epistemological or ontological relation. The judgments passed on the given reality are replaced by propositions defining the general forms of thought, objects of thought, and relations between thought and its objects. The subject of thought becomes the pure and universal form of subjectivity, from which all particulars are removed.”

Herbert Marcuse book One-Dimensional Man

Source: One-Dimensional Man (1964), pp. 135-136

World, Thinking, Reality, Affliction

“Without rhetorical exaggeration, a simply truthful combination of the miseries that have overwhelmed the noblest of nations and polities, and the finest exemplars of private virtue, forms a picture of most fearful aspect, and excites emotions of the profoundest and most hopeless sadness, counterbalanced by no consolatory result. We endure in beholding it a mental torture, allowing no defence or escape but the consideration that what has happened could not be otherwise; that it is a fatality which no intervention could alter. And at last we draw back from the intolerable disgust with which these sorrowful reflections threaten us, into the more agreeable environment of our individual life the Present formed by our private aims and interests. In short we retreat into the selfishness that stands on the quiet shore, and thence enjoys in safety the distant spectacle of "wrecks confusedly hurled." But even regarding History as the slaughter-bench at which the happiness of peoples, the wisdom of States, and the virtue of individuals have been victimised the question involuntarily arises to what principle, to what final aim these. enormous sacrifices have been offered.”

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel book Lectures on the Philosophy of History

Geschichte Als Schlachtbank
Pt. III, sec. 2, ch. 24 Lectures on the History of History Vol 1 p. 22 John Sibree translation (1857), 1914
Lectures on the Philosophy of History (1832), Volume 1

Life, Wisdom, People, Sadness

“Apollonius then asked him [Iarchas] whether they knew themselves also, thinking that he, like the Greeks, would regard self-knowledge as a difficult matter. But the other, contrary to Apollonius' expectations, corrected him and said: "We know everything, just because we begin by knowing ourselves; for no one of us would be admitted to this philosophy unless he first knew himself." And Apollonius remembered what he had heard Phraotes say, and how he who would become a philosopher must examine himself before he undertakes the task; and he therefore acquiesced in this answer, for he was convinced of its truth in his own case also.”

Philostratus book Life of Apollonius of Tyana

Book 3, § 18.
Life of Apollonius of Tyana

Knowledge, Thinking

“Tolstoy, the Russian writer, said in War and Peace: “I cannot conceive of a man not being free unless he is dead.” While this statement sounds a bit exaggerated, it gets at a basic truth. What Tolstoy is saying in substance is that the absence of freedom is the presence of death. Any nation or government that deprives an individual of freedom is in that moment committing an act of moral and spiritual murder. Any individual who is not concerned about his freedom commits an act of moral and spiritual suicide.”

Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–1968) American clergyman, activist, and leader in the American Civil Rights Movement

[http://mlk-kpp01.stanford.edu/primarydocuments/Vol5/17July1959_AddressattheFiftiethAnnualNAACPConvention.pdf Address at the Fiftieth Annual NAACP Convention (17 July 1959)
1950s

Death, War, Peace, Suicide