Answer to "Why are you always perceived as the bad guy?" "Spiegel Interview" http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,684789-4,00.html
“Harvard's motto is "Veritas." Many of you have already found out and others will find out in the course of their lives that truth eludes us if we do not concentrate with total attention on its pursuit. And even while it eludes us, the illusion still lingers of knowing it and leads to many misunderstandings. Also, truth is seldom pleasant; it is almost invariably bitter. There is some bitterness in my speech today, too. But I want to stress that it comes not from an adversary but from a friend.”
Harvard University address (1978)
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Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn 120
Russian writer 1918–2008Related quotes
The Complete Neurotic's Notebook (1981), Unclassified
“Yet such is the order of nature. While truth is always bitter, pleasantness waits upon evildoing.”
Ita se natura habet, ut amara sit veritas, blanda vitia existimentur.
Letter 40
Letters
"Oda do młodości" ["Ode to Youth"], 1905
Wicked Man.
Song lyrics, There Will Be a Light (2004)
Autobiographical sketch (23 July 1920), published in Portrait of a Marriage : Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson (1998), p. 3
Context: Of course I have no right whatsoever to write down the truth about my life involving as it naturally does the lives of so many other people, but I do so urged by a necessity of truth-telling, because there is no living soul who knows the complete truth; here, may be one who knows a section; and there, one who knows another section: but to the whole picture not one is initiated.
To.——, The Story of Justin Martyr and Other Poems; reported in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), p. 455.