I am sorry to think that you do not get a man’s most effective criticism until you provoke him. Severe truth is expressed with some bitterness.

Error is always more busy than truth.

All great truths begin as blasphemies.

The words of truth are always paradoxical.

So near is falsehood to truth that a wise man would do well not to trust himself on the narrow edge.

Sometimes I can’t figure designers out. It’s as if they flunked human anatomy.

If you can’t tolerate critics, don’t do anything new or interesting.

Sabotage did not involve loss of life, and it offered the best hope for future race relations. Bitterness would be kept to a minimum and, if the policy bore fruit, democratic government could become a reality.

The most important thing for a director is being able to communicate.

Nothing fortifies scepticism more than the fact that there are some who are not sceptics; if all were so, they would be wrong.

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

Half a truth is better than no politics.

Faith embraces many truths which seem to contradict each other.

One must know oneself. If this does not serve to discover truth, it at least serves as a rule of life and there is nothing better.

Let the future tell the truth, and evaluate each one according to his work and accomplishments. The present is theirs; the future, for which I have really worked, is mine.

We know the truth, not only by the reason, but also by the heart.

You have to understand that people that are hurting are going to criticize.

You don’t have to be scared of me, because I am loyal. Why are people so scared of creative ideas and so scared of truth? All I want to do is do good.

By and large, language is a tool for concealing the truth.

Truth is so rare that it is delightful to tell it.

Truth is handsomer than the affectation of love. Your goodness must have some edge to it, else it is none.

Modern education has devoted itself to the teaching of impudence, and then we complain that we can no longer control our mobs.

Seeing is not always believing.

Let us begin by committing ourselves to the truth to see it like it is, and tell it like it is, to find the truth, to speak the truth, and to live the truth.

A puritan is a person who pours righteous indignation into the wrong things.

Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.

Religion is more than life. Remember that his own religion is the truest to every man even if it stands low in the scales of philosophical comparison.

The minority is sometimes right; the majority always wrong.

Those wars are unjust which are undertaken without provocation. For only a war waged for revenge or defense can be just.

It’s much worse to read criticism about your son than yourself.

Frankly, I think that the news industry is critically important because it points out things and surfaces truths that can often be uncomfortable. I think that that’s working, and the spotlight has been pointed on things that we have a responsibility to do better, and I accept that.

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

No face which we can give to a matter will stead us so well at last as the truth. This alone wears well.

Whoever is careless with the truth in small matters cannot be trusted with important matters.

An example I often use to illustrate the reality of vanity, is this: look at the peacock; it’s beautiful if you look at it from the front. But if you look at it from behind, you discover the truth… Whoever gives in to such self-absorbed vanity has huge misery hiding inside them.

Even if you are a minority of one, the truth is the truth.

There’s no point in saying anything but the truth.

A lot of truth is said in jest.

In criticism I will be bold, and as sternly, absolutely just with friend and foe. From this purpose nothing shall turn me.

I think the 24-hour news cycle has helped exaggerate the differences between the parties. You can always find someone on TV somewhere carping about something. That didn’t happen 20 years ago.

Truth is the property of no individual but is the treasure of all men.

How can sincerity be a condition of friendship? A taste for truth at any cost is a passion which spares nothing.

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.

I like America, just as everybody else does. I love America, I gotta say that. But America will be judged.

The greatest enemy of any one of our truths may be the rest of our truths.

What I think is fair to say is that, coming out of the Republican camp, there have been efforts to suggest that perhaps I’m not who I say I am when it comes to my faith – something which I find deeply offensive, and that has been going on for a pretty long time.

No legacy is so rich as honesty.

Peace if possible, truth at all costs.

Truth emerges more readily from error than from confusion.

The problem with Yanks is they are wimps.

I know that campaigns can seem small, and even silly. Trivial things become big distractions. Serious issues become sound bites. And the truth gets buried under an avalanche of money and advertising. If you’re sick of hearing me approve this message, believe me – so am I.

If there is one thing I fear less than everything else, it is, I believe, persecution for my opinions. There are a good many points about which I may be diffident, but when it comes to questions of Truth and intellectual independence, there is no holding me – I can envisage no finer end than to sacrifice oneself for a conviction.

I tend not to like an awful lot of what is going out under my name now because it is just all product. Who needs it?

No such thing as a man willing to be honest – that would be like a blind man willing to see.

It is the nature of truth in general, as of some ores in particular, to be richest when most superficial.

The object of the superior man is truth.

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.

What I’ve discovered is that in art, as in music, there’s a lot of truth-and then there’s a lie. The artist is essentially creating his work to make this lie a truth, but he slides it in amongst all the others. The tiny little lie is the moment I live for, my moment. It’s the moment that the audience falls in love.

He who knows nothing is closer to the truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods and errors.

The truth is often terrifying, which I think is one of the motifs of Larry and Andrew’s cinema. The cost of knowledge is an important theme. In the second and third films, they explore the consequences of Neo’s choice to know the truth. It’s a beautiful, beautiful story.

In fact men will fight for a superstition quite as quickly as for a living truth – often more so, since a superstition is so intangible you cannot get at it to refute it, but truth is a point of view, and so is changeable.