Famous Quotes & Sayings

George Santayana

The truth properly means the sum of all true propositions, what omniscience would assert, the whole ideal system of qualities andrelations which the world has exemplified or will exemplify. The truth is all things seen under the form of eternity.

George McGovern

So, I think that's the centerpiece of morality: Don't lie. But to do that, you have to go a step further and find out what the truth is.

George Orwell

Myths which are believed in tend to become true.

George Orwell

Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else.

George Orwell

Until they became conscious they will never rebel, and until after they have rebelled they cannot become conscious.

George Orwell

The process [of mass-media deception] has to be conscious, or it would not be carried out with sufficient precision, but it also has to be unconscious, or it would bring with it a feeling of falsity and hence of guilt.... To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies all this is indispensably necessary.

George Orwell

The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns, as it were, instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink.

G. Stanley Hall

All possible truth is practical. To ask whether our conception of chair or table corresponds to the real chair or table apart from the uses to which they may be put, is as utterly meaningless and vain as to inquire whether a musical tone is red or yellow. No other conceivable relation than this between ideas and things can exist. The unknowable is what I cannot react upon. The active part of our nature is not only an essential part of cognition itself, but it always has a voice in determining what shall be believed and what rejected.

G. M. Trevelyan

The poetry of history lies in the quasi-miraculous fact that Once, on this earth, on this familiar spot of ground, walked other men and women, as actual as we are today, thinking their own thoughts, swayed by their own passions, but now all are gone, one generation vanishing after another, gone as utterly as we ourselves shall shortly be gone like ghosts at cockcrow.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Something might be true while being harmful and dangerous in the highest degree. Indeed, it might be a basic characteristic of existence that those who know it completely would perish, in which case the strength of a spirit should be measured according to how much of the 'truth' one could still barely endure- or to put it more clearly, to what degree one would require it to be thinned down, shrouded, sweetened, blunted, falsified.

George Saunders

I'd just say that truth is power and vice versa.

Friedrich Nietzsche

The reasons for which 'this' world has been characterized as 'apparent' are the very reasons which indicate its reality; any other kind of reality is absolutely indemonstrable.

Galileo Galilei

Two truths cannot contradict one another.

I don't know how much I'm going to find out. I don't know how much of the truth will be told.

Ione Skye

It always feels good to tell you the truth. If I can't share it with you, it feels like it didn't happen.

Thomas Jefferson

The advertisements are the most truthful part of a newspaper.

Jean de la Bruyere

The exact contrary of what is generally believed is often the truth.

Ernst Toller

Slogans which deafened us so that we could not hear the truth.

Henry David Thoreau

Exaggeration! was ever any virtue attributed to a man without exaggeration? was ever any vice, without infinite exaggeration? Do we not exaggerate ourselves to ourselves, or do we recognize ourselves for the actual men we are? Are we not all great men? Yet what are we actually, to speak of? We live by exaggeration.

Henry David Thoreau

Let us not underrate the value of a fact; it will one day flower in a truth. It is astonishing how few facts of importance are added in a century to the natural history of any animal. The natural history of man himself is still being gradually written.

Henry David Thoreau

Truth is his inspirer, and earnestness the polisher of his sentences. He could afford to lose his Sharp's rifles, while he retained his faculty of speech,--a Sharp's rifle of infinitely surer and longer range.

Jeremy Collier

Truth is the band of union and the basis of human happiness. Without this virtue there is no reliance upon language, no confidence in friendship, no security in promises and oaths.

Horace Mann

Seek not greatness, but seek truth and you will find both.

Elizabeth Warren

I don't want happy-face conclusions. I want the truth.

Rene Russo

I didn't want to be an actress when I was younger - not even when I was older, to tell you the truth.

Mary Leakey

You only find what you are looking for, really, if the truth be known.

A.J. Burnett

Every one disguising the truth from a man who has a right to the truth is wrong, and ought not to be encouraged.

Roseanne Barr

Nothing real or truthful makes its way to TV unless you are smart and know how to sneak it in, and I would tell you how I did it, but then I would have to kill you.

Adrienne Rich

Lying is done with words and also with silence.

Agatha Christie

Truth, however bitter, can be accepted, and woven into a design for living.

Adrian Rogers

It is better to ultimately succeed with the truth than to temporarily succeed with a lie.

Ludwig von Mises

There are for man only two principles available for a mental grasp of reality, namely, those of teleology and causality. What cannot be brought under either of these categories is absolutely hidden to the human mind. An event not open to an interpretation by one of these two principles is for man inconceivable and mysterious. Change can be conceived as the outcome either of the operation of mechanistic causality or of purposeful behavior; for the human mind there is no third way available.

Ludwig von Mises

The criterion of truth is that it works even if nobody is prepared to acknowledge it.