“Truth is so hard to tell, it sometimes needs fiction to make it plausible.”
Source: Orlando: A Biography (1928), Ch. 4
“Is the world so unbearable? No! What we need is only a little more love for the world.”
#4386, Part 5
Seventy Seven Thousand Service-Trees series 1-50 (1998)
“I had a story tell, a story that needed to be told so that people would know the truth.”
Congressional testimony (2007)
Variant translation: "...the search for truth strains the patience of most people, who would rather believe the first things that come to hand." Translation by Paul Woodruff.
Book I, 1.20-[3]
History of the Peloponnesian War, Book I
Environmentalism as a Religion (2003)
Context: Environmentalism needs to be absolutely based in objective and verifiable science, it needs to be rational, and it needs to be flexible. And it needs to be apolitical. To mix environmental concerns with the frantic fantasies that people have about one political party or another is to miss the cold truth — that there is very little difference between the parties, except a difference in pandering rhetoric. The effort to promote effective legislation for the environment is not helped by thinking that the Democrats will save us and the Republicans won't. Political history is more complicated than that.
“When little is done, little is said; silence is the mother of truth.”
Bk. IV, Ch. 4.
Books, Coningsby (1844), Tancred (1847)
Knowing Yourself: The True in the False (1996)
