If anything, I get most upset because I wanna read a good paper first thing in the morning. And if I see a lie about myself flash across the front of the cover, I don’t think much of the rest of the newspaper.

Let us read and let us dance – two amusements that will never do any harm to the world.

One isn’t necessarily born with courage, but one is born with potential. Without courage, we cannot practice any other virtue with consistency. We can’t be kind, true, merciful, generous, or honest.

All that we call ideal in Greek or any other art, because to us it is false and visionary, was, to the makers of it, true and existent.

Nothing induces me to read a novel except when I have to make money by writing about it. I detest them.

I don’t think I’ve ever read poetry, ever.

The best thing is to always keep honest people around, because when you have a bunch of yes men around that know that you’re making a mistake but let you go on with it, that’s when it ruins your mind state as an artist.

Every man has a right to utter what he thinks truth, and every other man has a right to knock him down for it. Martyrdom is the test.

The great quest of life has always been to discover truth.

Yes, across Europe, this wall will fall. For it cannot withstand faith; it cannot withstand truth. The wall cannot withstand freedom.

I haven’t read Horowitz. I didn’t used to read him when he was a Stalinist, and I don’t read him today.

I think it’s an Irish thing. We don’t really care. We say it as we mean it, and you have to deal with it. The truth is the truth.

I can’t pretend that I’m brave and that I can beat the whole world.

Morality is the basis of things and truth is the substance of all morality.

All the war-propaganda, all the screaming and lies and hatred, comes invariably from people who are not fighting.

Men despise religion. They hate it and are afraid it may be true.

Many a doctrine is like a window pane. We see truth through it but it divides us from truth.

Live truth instead of professing it.

I was really too honest a man to be a politician and live.

I promised myself that I would write as well as I can, tell the truth, not to tell everything I know, but to make sure that everything I tell is true, as I understand it. And to use the eloquence which my language affords me.

I’m sure most parents read to their children to explain what certain things mean. So books are a good way to convey a message to anybody. Everybody reads.

I don’t think I’ve ever read poetry, ever. I’m not really book-smart.

A lack of transparency results in distrust and a deep sense of insecurity.

My music definitely comes from a place of experience. Everything connects to a truth.

Silence is the mother of truth.

Belief is a wise wager. Granted that faith cannot be proved, what harm will come to you if you gamble on its truth and it proves false? If you gain, you gain all; if you lose, you lose nothing. Wager, then, without hesitation, that He exists.

A little sincerity is a dangerous thing, and a great deal of it is absolutely fatal.

It is far better to grasp the universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring.

Tell me, why is the media here so negative? Why are we in India so embarrassed to recognise our own strengths, our achievements? We are such a great nation. We have so many amazing success stories but we refuse to acknowledge them. Why?

Libraries raised me.

Justice and truth are too such subtle points that our tools are too blunt to touch them accurately.

People who read the tabloids deserve to be lied to.

Great is truth, but still greater, from a practical point of view, is silence about truth. By simply not mentioning certain subjects… totalitarian propagandists have influenced opinion much more effectively than they could have by the most eloquent denunciations.

A reader can never tell if it’s a real thimble or an imaginary thimble, because by the time you’re reading it, they’re the same. It’s a thimble. It’s in the book.

Christianity, if false, is of no importance, and if true, of infinite importance. The only thing it cannot be is moderately important.

‚Tis not enough your counsel still be true; Blunt truths more mischief than nice falsehoods do.

Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it.

Anger cannot be dishonest.

The most costly of all follies is to believe passionately in the palpably not true. It is the chief occupation of mankind.

The income tax has made liars out of more Americans than golf.

Life is an unfoldment, and the further we travel the more truth we can comprehend. To understand the things that are at our door is the best preparation for understanding those that lie beyond.

Few men would dare to read their own autobiography if all their deeds were recorded in it; few can look back upon their entire career without a blush.

Quacks are a part of our culture, and we all fall prey to them. Who among us can say, for sure, that even our own personal physicians are honest and competent?

It is good to express a thing twice right at the outset and so to give it a right foot and also a left one. Truth can surely stand on one leg, but with two it will be able to walk and get around.

Sadly, I do my homework. I’ve a soft spot for the boring minutiae. I read the Charter of the United Nations before meeting with Kofi Annan. I read the Meltzer report, and then I’ll read C. Fred Bergsten’s defense of institutions like the World Bank and the I.M.F. It’s embarrassing to admit.

Reading and writing, like everything else, improve with practice. And, of course, if there are no young readers and writers, there will shortly be no older ones. Literacy will be dead, and democracy – which many believe goes hand in hand with it – will be dead as well.

It seems a fantastic paradox, but it is nevertheless a most important truth, that no architecture can be truly noble which is not imperfect.

The reason that fiction is more interesting than any other form of literature, to those who really like to study people, is that in fiction the author can really tell the truth without humiliating himself.

‚Classic.‘ A book which people praise and don’t read.

Nine times out of ten, in the arts as in life, there is actually no truth to be discovered; there is only error to be exposed.

Confession of errors is like a broom which sweeps away the dirt and leaves the surface brighter and clearer. I feel stronger for confession.

I don’t want to tell President Obama how to make a speech. He’s a much better speech maker than I am. But I think always to tell the truth in a sometimes blatant way, even though it might be temporarily unpopular, is the best approach.

A system of morality which is based on relative emotional values is a mere illusion, a thoroughly vulgar conception which has nothing sound in it and nothing true.

I’ve just always been a reader.

Words can be said in bitterness and anger, and often there seems to be an element of truth in the nastiness. And words don’t go away, they just echo around.

I am not a crook.

The minority is sometimes right; the majority always wrong.

I’ve never been a manipulator, even in my bachelor days. I never wanted to do things to people that could catch up with me later on.

In whatever adulation you get, there’s truth and there’s not truth. And wherever they dog you, and they say it was horrible – there’s truth and there’s not truth. It’s human nature to like to read the adulation more.

Justice is truth in action.

Truth has no special time of its own. Its hour is now – always.