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.

Books that you carry to the fire, and hold readily in your hand, are most useful after all.

If you do not tell the truth about yourself you cannot tell it about other people.

You don’t have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.

Now we have a problem in making our power credible, and Vietnam is the place.

To remain a credible leader, I must always work first, hardest, and longest on changing myself. This is neither easy nor natural, but it is essential.

I was always very curious as a young man about why older writers who I met seemed so indifferent to what was going on, whereas I, in my 20s, was reading everything. Everything seemed important. But they were only interested in the writers they admired when they were young, and I didn’t understand it then, but now, now I understand it.

Fiction is not necessarily about what you know, it’s about how you feel. That is the truth about fiction, and the other truth is that all science is a tool, and we use our tools not to actualise what we know, but to implement how we feel.

You don’t read in your own field. You read in that field when you’re young, so that you can learn.

Nature never deceives us; it is we who deceive ourselves.

There are only two mistakes one can make along the road to truth; not going all the way, and not starting.

Truth stands, even if there be no public support. It is self-sustained.

I don’t think the intelligence reports are all that hot. Some days I get more out of the New York Times.

The influence of a mother upon the lives of her children cannot be measured. They know and absorb her example and attitudes when it comes to questions of honesty, temperance, kindness, and industry.

If one could be friendly with women, what a pleasure – the relationship so secret and private compared with relations with men. Why not write about it truthfully?

A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on.

Experience has shown, and a true philosophy will always show, that a vast, perhaps the larger portion of the truth arises from the seemingly irrelevant.

Persuasion is achieved by the speaker’s personal character when the speech is so spoken as to make us think him credible. We believe good men more fully and more readily than others: this is true generally whatever the question is, and absolutely true where exact certainty is impossible and opinions are divided.

A great value of antiquity lies in the fact that its writings are the only ones that modern men still read with exactness.

Books are like a mirror. If an ass looks in, you can’t expect an angel to look out.

The most violent show on TV is the six o’clock news.

I can’t tell you the number of times I looked down at what was going on on the ground, or I was engaged in a fight somewhere, and I knew within a couple of minutes how I was going to screw up the enemy. And I knew it because I’d done so much reading.

If I’d written all the truth I knew for the past ten years, about 600 people – including me – would be rotting in prison cells from Rio to Seattle today. Absolute truth is a very rare and dangerous commodity in the context of professional journalism.

Of course it’s the same old story. Truth usually is the same old story.

Expectations are a form of first-class truth: If people believe it, it’s true.

I was thinking about how people seem to read the Bible a whole lot more as they get older; then it dawned on me – they’re cramming for their final exam.

Reason is the natural order of truth; but imagination is the organ of meaning.

My religion is based on truth and non-violence. Truth is my God. Non-violence is the means of realising Him.

If you don’t have the time to read, you don’t have the time or the tools to write.

Honesty is the best policy – when there is money in it.

The first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool.

There is never vulgarity in a whole truth, however commonplace. It may be unimportant or painful. It cannot be vulgar. Vulgarity is only in concealment of truth, or in affectation.

I spent three days a week for 10 years educating myself in the public library, and it’s better than college. People should educate themselves – you can get a complete education for no money. At the end of 10 years, I had read every book in the library and I’d written a thousand stories.

Half a truth is often a great lie.

The lie is a condition of life.

Some minds remain open long enough for the truth not only to enter but to pass on through by way of a ready exit without pausing anywhere along the route.

When you’re young, you look at television and think, there’s a conspiracy. The networks have conspired to dumb us down. But when you get a little older, you realize that’s not true. The networks are in business to give people exactly what they want.

Not everyone can see the truth, but he can be it.

If anyone offers conjectures about the truth of things from the mere possibility of hypotheses, I do not see by what stipulation anything certain can be determined in any science, since one or another set of hypotheses may always be devised which will appear to supply new difficulties.

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

Between the ages of fifteen and twenty-four, I must have read a whole library.

With people of limited ability modesty is merely honesty. But with those who possess great talent it is hypocrisy.

Anyone who doesn’t take truth seriously in small matters cannot be trusted in large ones either.

Truth is like the sun. You can shut it out for a time, but it ain’t goin‘ away.

A free press can, of course, be good or bad, but, most certainly without freedom, the press will never be anything but bad.

I stand by all the misstatements that I’ve made.

It’s very difficult to read a book on your computer.

Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.

For me, I used to be shy towards journalism because it wasn’t poetry. And then I realized that the events that I covered in essays that became journalism were actually great because they inspired me, and they became my muse.

Truth has rough flavours if we bite it through.

Tell the children the truth.

The book to read is not the one which thinks for you, but the one which makes you think. No book in the world equals the Bible for that.

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.

Knowledge is true opinion.

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

There’s just some magic in truth and honesty and openness.

I’m not well-read, but when I read, I read well.

The best measure of a man’s honesty isn’t his income tax return. It’s the zero adjust on his bathroom scale.

The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who cannot read them.

I do not pilfer victory.

Newspapers are the second hand of history. This hand, however, is usually not only of inferior metal to the other hands, it also seldom works properly.