If you’re lying, you’re lying.

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

It is a profound and necessary truth that the deep things in science are not found because they are useful: they are found because it was possible to find them.

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.

Seeing is not always believing.

Let’s be honest – tracking down, rounding up, and deporting millions of people isn’t realistic. Anyone who suggests otherwise isn’t being straight with you. It’s also not who we are as Americans.

I want to be a man who is truthful and who won’t let pride get in the way of my ripping myself open to my partner and saying, ‚Here I am. This is me.‘ I feel there’s something powerful when a man reaches a point in his life when he can be completely vulnerable.

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.

Half a truth is better than no politics.

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.

It’s plain hokum. If you can’t convince ‚em, confuse ‚em. It’s an old political trick. But this time it won’t work.

I am being frank about myself in this book. I tell of my first mistake on page 850.

George Washington, as a boy, was ignorant of the commonest accomplishments of youth. He could not even lie.

Plato is my friend; Aristotle is my friend, but my greatest friend is truth.

It is dangerous to be right in matters on which the established authorities are wrong.

A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.

Concentration is my motto – first honesty, then industry, then concentration.

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

When I was young, an eccentric uncle decided to teach me how to lie. Not, he explained, because he wanted me to lie, but because he thought I should know how it’s done so I would recognise when I was being lied to.

Never pretend to a love which you do not actually feel, for love is not ours to command.

The truth is, I have absolutely no professional credentials – literally, which is why I’m teaching at MIT.

And, after all, what is a lie? ‚Tis but the truth in a masquerade.

Truth is a pathless land.

Integrity has no need of rules.

True friends stab you in the front.

Treat those who are good with goodness, and also treat those who are not good with goodness. Thus goodness is attained. Be honest to those who are honest, and be also honest to those who are not honest. Thus honesty is attained.

Truth lives, in fact, for the most part on a credit system. Our thoughts and beliefs pass, so long as nothing challenges them, just as bank-notes pass so long as nobody refuses them.

A subtle thought that is in error may yet give rise to fruitful inquiry that can establish truths of great value.

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

Advertising is a racket, like the movies and the brokerage business. You cannot be honest without admitting that its constructive contribution to humanity is exactly minus zero.

Tricks and treachery are the practice of fools, that don’t have brains enough to be honest.

Peace if possible, truth at all costs.

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.

For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring.

I was once a journalist. And I think of myself as a journalist, and that’s it. You tell the truth. I even wrote a book called ‚The Truth‘.

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.

We have to live today by what truth we can get today and be ready tomorrow to call it falsehood.

Nothing is beautiful, only man: on this piece of naivete rests all aesthetics, it is the first truth of aesthetics. Let us immediately add its second: nothing is ugly but degenerate man – the domain of aesthetic judgment is therewith defined.

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

Faith embraces many truths which seem to contradict each other.

Truth is the daughter of time, not of authority.

One thing about me is I try to be honest.

All the truth in the world adds up to one big lie.

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.

The most common lie is that which one lies to himself; lying to others is relatively an exception.

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

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

I’m actually a very honest person, and sometimes I end up like, ‚Man, I said too much.‘ It’s hard for me not to tell the truth when you ask me.

Convictions are more dangerous foes of truth than lies.

But the attitude of faith is to let go, and become open to truth, whatever it might turn out to be.

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.

The best way to keep one’s word is not to give it.

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.

Strike an average between what a woman thinks of her husband a month before she marries him and what she thinks of him a year afterward, and you will have the truth about him.

Unlike some politicians, I can admit to a mistake.

The truth is found when men are free to pursue it.

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.

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

Lying in bed would be an altogether perfect and supreme experience if only one had a colored pencil long enough to draw on the ceiling.

A person should not be too honest. Straight trees are cut first and honest people are screwed first.

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