
“If the truth is worth telling, it is worth making a fool of yourself to tell.”
Telling the Truth (1977)
Introductio ad prudentiam: Part II (1727), Gnomologia (1732)
“If the truth is worth telling, it is worth making a fool of yourself to tell.”
Telling the Truth (1977)
“Children and fools speak the truth; and somehow they find happiness in their sincerity.”
Source: Fallen Leaves (2014), Ch. 1 : Our life begins
“Pretty much all the honest truth-telling there is in the world is done by children.”
A paraphrase of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., in "The Poet at the Breakfast-Table" in The Atlantic Monthly Vol. 29 (1872), p. 231: "I like children, — he said to me one day at table. — I like 'em, and I respect 'em. Pretty much all the honest truth-telling there is in the world is done by them".
Misattributed
“Any fool can tell the truth, but it requires a man of some sense to know how to lie well.”
Falsehood, iii
The Note-Books of Samuel Butler (1912), Part XIX - Truth and Convenience
“They say the only people who tell the truth are drunkards and children. Guess which one I am.”
“Children and fooles cannot lye.”
Part I, chapter 11.
Proverbs (1546), Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)
Variant: Children and fooles cannot lye.
Camp Columbia, Havana (Jan. 8th, 1959), Fidel Castro Reader, pp. 133