I have been a professor, and I have been a policymaker, and as a professor, you think in terms of truth or absolutes.

Let a man get up and say, Behold, this is the truth, and instantly I perceive a sandy cat filching a piece of fish in the background. Look, you have forgotten the cat, I say.

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

There are a terrible lot of lies going about the world, and the worst of it is that half of them are true.

Judgments, value judgments concerning life, for or against, can in the last resort never be true: they possess value only as symptoms, they come into consideration only as symptoms – in themselves such judgments are stupidities.

I met Howard Zinn in 1961, my first year at Spelman College in Atlanta. He was the tall, rangy, good-looking professor that many of the girls at Spelman swooned over.

Silence is the mother of truth.

There is nothing so strong or safe in an emergency of life as the simple truth.

Man will occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of the time he will pick himself up and continue on.

All fixed set patterns are incapable of adaptability or pliability. The truth is outside of all fixed patterns.

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.

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.

A man dies when he refuses to stand up for that which is right. A man dies when he refuses to stand up for justice. A man dies when he refuses to take a stand for that which is true.

All truth is simple… is that not doubly a lie?

The thing about the truth is, not a lot of people can handle it.

If you are out to describe the truth, leave elegance to the tailor.

Two qualities are indispensable: first, an intellect that, even in the darkest hour, retains some glimmerings of the inner light which leads to truth; and second, the courage to follow this faint light wherever it may lead.

That’s another hallmark of truth, is that it snaps things together. People write to me all the time and say it’s as if things were coming together in my mind. It’s like the Platonic idea that all learning was remembering. You have a nature, and when you feel that nature articulated, it’s it’s like the act of snapping the puzzle pieces together.

Science is but an image of the truth.

The passive aggressive arguer comes armed with tricky tactics. They cannot take the risk that they might be wrong: their self-esteem is too intertwined with their opinions. It is more important to affirm their rightness, and sense of superiority, than to arrive at the truth.

The pursuit of truth and beauty is a sphere of activity in which we are permitted to remain children all our lives.

Truth is what works.

The great enemy of the truth is very often not the lie, deliberate, contrived and dishonest, but the myth, persistent, persuasive and unrealistic.

All truths are easy to understand once they are discovered; the point is to discover them.

A gaffe in Washington is someone telling the truth, and telling the truth has never hurt me.

It was one of those evenings when men feel that truth, goodness and beauty are one. In the morning, when they commit their discovery to paper, when others read it written there, it looks wholly ridiculous.

Engineering training deals with the exact sciences. That sort of exactness makes for truth and conscience. It might be good for the world if more men had that sort of mental start in life even if they did not pursue the profession.

It is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top.

There’s no one thing that is true. They’re all true.

The lie is a condition of life.

A man must be both stupid and uncharitable who believes there is no virtue or truth but on his own side.

I do not know what I may appear to the world; but to myself, I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself now and then in finding a smoother pebble or prettier shell than ordinary, while the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.

Say not, ‚I have found the truth,‘ but rather, ‚I have found a truth.‘

A remark generally hurts in proportion to its truth.

The business schools reward difficult complex behavior more than simple behavior, but simple behavior is more effective.

Time discovers truth.

If you want to become fully mature in the Lord, you must learn to love truth. Otherwise, you will always leave open a door of deception for the enemy to take what is meant to be yours.

New knowledge is the most valuable commodity on earth. The more truth we have to work with, the richer we become.

A lot of truth is said in jest.

I grow daily to honour facts more and more, and theory less and less. A fact, it seems to me, is a great thing; a sentence printed, if not by God, then at least by the Devil.

Half a truth is better than no politics.

Every mind must make its choice between truth and repose. It cannot have both.

There are lies, damned lies and statistics.

I believe that it is better to tell the truth than a lie. I believe it is better to be free than to be a slave. And I believe it is better to know than to be ignorant.

There’s a world of difference between truth and facts. Facts can obscure the truth.

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

And we should consider every day lost on which we have not danced at least once. And we should call every truth false which was not accompanied by at least one laugh.

I’d done a lot of research in Hollywood and in academia. I love research and so I wanted to kind of ground the book in history, in things that I read that were universal and timeless and then kind of let my own experiences sort of filter through all of this history.

Truth is so obscure in these times, and falsehood so established, that, unless we love the truth, we cannot know it.

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.

What we have to do, what at any rate it is our duty to do, is to revive the old art of Lying.

Seeing is not always believing.

It’s no wonder that truth is stranger than fiction. Fiction has to make sense.

I have nothing new to teach the world. Truth and Non-violence are as old as the hills. All I have done is to try experiments in both on as vast a scale as I could.

Peace if possible, truth at all costs.

I wasn’t a normal professor. I had worked in government. I hadn’t written nine zillion books. I was a hands-on professor.

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

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.

It is not when truth is dirty, but when it is shallow, that the lover of knowledge is reluctant to step into its waters.

Truth, being limitless, unconditioned, unapproachable by any path whatsoever, cannot be organized; nor should any organization be formed to lead or to coerce people along any particular path. If you first understand that, then you will see how impossible it is to organize a belief.

If you tell the truth, you don’t have to remember anything.