
“1092. Children and Fools tell Truth.”
Introductio ad prudentiam: Part II (1727), Gnomologia (1732)
“1092. Children and Fools tell Truth.”
Introductio ad prudentiam: Part II (1727), Gnomologia (1732)
“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
“They say the only people who tell the truth are drunkards and children. Guess which one I am.”
The Story of Islamic Imperialism in India (1994)
“What is to prevent one from telling truth as he laughs, even as teachers sometimes give cookies to children to coax them into learning their A B C?”
Quamquam ridentem dicere verum quid vetat? ut pueris olim dant crustula blandi doctores, elementa velint ut discere prima.
Book I, satire i, line 24
Satires (c. 35 BC and 30 BC)
“Tell all the truth but tell it slant.”
1129: Tell all the Truth but tell it slant —
The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson (1960)
Variant: Tell all the Truth but tell it slant —
Success in Circuit lies
Source: The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson
Context: p>Tell all the Truth but tell it slant —
Success in Circuit lies
Too bright for our infirm Delight
The Truth's superb surpriseAs Lightning to the Children eased
With explanation kind
The Truth must dazzle gradually
Or every man be blind —</p
Source: The Thirteenth Tale
"Life After Lebanon" (1984), later published in On Call : Political Essays (1985), and Some of Us Did Not Die : New and Selected Essays of June Jordan (2002)