“It is not, then, in the content or substance of folly that its difference from truth lies, but in where it comes from. It comes not from ‘the wise man’s mouth’ but from the mouth of the subject assumed not to know and speak the truth.”

— J.M. Coetzee

“Erasmus: Madness and Rivalry,” Giving Offense: Essays on Censorship (1996), p. 94

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J.M. Coetzee 61

South African writer 1940

Edward S. Herman (1925–2017) American journalist

Source: Beyond Hypocrisy, 1992, Doublespeak Dictionary (within Beyond Hypocrisy), p. 181.

“In those days, when people were not wise like you young people, they were content to listen to a tree or a rock in simple openness, just as long as it spoke the truth, but to you, perhaps, it makes a difference who is speaking and where he comes from.”

Plato book Phaedrus

275c, as translated by Joe Sachs in introduction to Aristotle's Physics: A Guided Study (2011), p. 1
Phaedrus

“If from a person's mouth comes a downpour of thorns, from yours should come the petals of a rose.”

Muhammad Alauddin Siddiqui (1936–2017) Islamic Sufi Scholar

Shaykh Muhammad Allauddin Siddiqui

“Where words come out from the depth of truth”

Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941) Bengali polymath

Gitanjali http://www.spiritualbee.com/gitanjali-poems-of-tagore/ (1912)
Context: Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high
Where knowledge is free
Where the world has not been broken up into fragments
By narrow domestic walls
Where words come out from the depth of truth
Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection
Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way
Into the dreary desert sand of dead habit
Where the mind is led forward by thee
Into ever-widening thought and action
Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake.

“Real power comes not from hate, but from truth.”

Seth Grahame-Smith (1976) US fiction author

Source: Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter

“Let every one of us cultivate, in every word that issues from our mouth, absolute truth.”

Dinah Craik (1826–1887) English novelist and poet

Source: A Woman's Thoughts About Women (1858), Ch. 8
Context: Let every one of us cultivate, in every word that issues from our mouth, absolute truth. I say cultivate, because to very few people — as may be noticed of most young children — does truth, this rigid, literal veracity, come by nature. To many, even who love it and prize it dearly in others, it comes only after the self-control, watchfulness, and bitter experience of years.