Famous Quotes & Sayings

Conrad Aiken

The truth--a hideous spectacle!

Sydney J. Harris

Honesty consists of the unwillingness to lie to others; maturity, which is equally hard to attain, consists of the unwillingness to lie to oneself.

Thomas Jefferson

Ignorance is preferable to error, and he is less remote from the truth who believes nothing than he who believes what is wrong.

Marie Corelli

What was the use of trying to expound a truth, if the majority preferred a lie?

Marie Curie

There are sadistic scientists who hurry to hunt down errors instead of establishing the truth.

Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach

The simplest and most familiar truth seems new and wonderful the instant we ourselves experience it for the first time.

Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach

Many a truth is the result of an error.

Teri Garr

No matter how bad the truth is, it doesn't tear you apart inside like dishonesty.

Theodore Roosevelt

We cannot afford to differ on the question of honesty if we expect our republic permanently to endure. Honesty is not so much a credit as an absolute prerequisite to efficient service to the public. Unless a man is honest, we have no right to keep him in public life; it matters not how brilliant his capacity.

Richard Leakey

Echoing the criticism made of his father's habilis skulls, he added that Lucy's skull was so incomplete that most of it was 'imagination made of plaster of Paris', thus making it impossible to draw any firm conclusion about what species she belonged to.

T. D. Jakes

I grew up in hospitals. My father was sick. So I grew up in hospitals from the age of 10. Got to see a lot of suffering.

Harper Lee

I suppose she chose me because she knew my name; as I read the alphabet a faint line appeared between her eyebrows, and after making me read most of My First Reader and the stock-market quotations from The Mobile Register aloud, she discovered that I was literate and looked at me with more than faint distaste. Miss Caroline told me to tell my father not to teach me any more, it would interfere with my reading.

Iyanla Vanzant

For most of my life, I believed that my father had broken many of my bones. They were emotional and psychological bones; things no one could see, things that caused me to limp through life clutching for and holding on to people and situations that often rendered me immobile.

Rebecca West

Were I to go down into the market-place, armed with the powers of witchcraft, and take a peasant by the shoulders and whisper to him, 'In your lifetime, have you known peace?' wait for his answer, shake his shoulders and transform him into his father, and ask him the same question, and transform him in his turn to his father, I would never hear the word 'Yes,' if I carried my questioning of the dead back for a thousand years. I would always hear, 'No, there was fear, there were our enemies without, our rulers within, there was prison, there was torture, there was violent death.

Russell Baker

A man writing a letter is a man in the act of thinking, and it was an exercise Reagan obviously enjoyed. After his first meeting with Gorbachev, for example, he sent a 'Dear Murph' letter about it to his old friend George Murphy, a former senator and actor who had once played Reagan's father in a film.

Umberto Eco

My father was an accountant and his father was a typographer.

Salman Rushdie

Anyone who reads my work will see that there are often difficult relationships between fathers and sons.

Sam Brownback

You can look at founding father Alexander Hamilton nevertheless assuring - assuring - the countrymen in Federalist 78 that the role of the federal courts under the proposed Constitution would be limited.

Ludwig von Mises

Capitalism and socialism are two distinct patterns of social organization. Private control of the means of production and public control are contradictory notions and not merely contrary notions. There is no such thing as a mixed economy, a system that would stand midway between capitalism and socialism.

Viktor E. Frankl

Being tolerant does not mean that I share another ones belief. But it does mean that I acknowledge another ones right to believe, and obey, his own conscience.

Adam Clarke

Multitudes of words are neither an argument of clear ideas in the writer, nor a proper means of conveying clear notions to the reader.

Annalee Newitz

My first goal would be to reduce the perturbation in the carbon cycle. That would mean using carbon neutral sources of energy, and changing our agricultural practices to be less disruptive and polluting. I'm not talking about a policy here so much as changing the way our infrastructure works. That's why I'm so fascinated with changing the way we build cities, because they are the most developed forms of physical infrastructure for human habitation.

Ani Difranco

You rhapsodize about beauty, and my eyes glaze. Everything that I love is ugly. I mean really, you would be amazed. Just do me a favor, it's the least that you can do, just don't treat me like I am something that happened to you.

Ani Difranco

I mean, I think it's hard enough to find somebody you can stand for more than ten minutes, so, like, you shouldn't narrow your options.

Ani Difranco

I see a lot of connections between folk and punk music just because they're both subcorporate music - I mean, traditionally.

Andy Goldsworthy

I'm an artist living in a small, Scottish village. So one would expect to be treated with some sort of caution. And the village and the farmers have shown enormous tolerance of me and interest in what I do. I mean, they don't necessarily understand what I'm doing all the time. But they, you know, I think they respect what I do and that there is a connection between what they do with the land and what I do, you know, that we're both dependent on weather and respond to that.

Andrew Miller

Listening is not merely not talking...it means taking a vigorous human interest in what is being told to us.