Political language… is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.

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

Too many Christians live their lives like slaves – to the devil – because they believe his lies more than they trust God.

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

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

There are no facts, only interpretations.

There are people who cannot forget, as neither do I, the lesson of the years of the Indochina War. Which was, first, that the state is capable of being a murderer. A mass murderer, and a conspirator and a liar.

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

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.

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

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

Why shouldn’t truth be stranger than fiction? Fiction, after all, has to make sense.

Non-violence and truth are inseparable and presuppose one another.

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

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

I am not handsome or sexy. Of course, it’s not like I am hopeless.

There is only one failure in life possible, and that is not to be true to the best one knows.

I am a humble but very earnest seeker after truth.

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.

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.

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.

Nothing is more noble, nothing more venerable than fidelity. Faithfulness and truth are the most sacred excellences and endowments of the human mind.

Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities. Truth isn’t.

People do not wish to appear foolish; to avoid the appearance of foolishness, they are willing to remain actually fools.

Something unpleasant is coming when men are anxious to tell the truth.

Mystical explanations are thought to be deep; the truth is that they are not even shallow.

We never fully grasp the import of any true statement until we have a clear notion of what the opposite untrue statement would be.

The truth is something that burns. It burns off dead wood. And people don’t like having the dead wood burnt off, often because they’re 95 percent dead wood.

Where there is shouting, there is no true knowledge.

The pursuit of truth does not permit violence on one’s opponent.

I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in reality. This is why right, temporarily defeated, is stronger than evil triumphant.

Children say that people are hung sometimes for speaking the truth.

The truth is incontrovertible. Malice may attack it, ignorance may deride it, but in the end, there it is.

There are only two things. Truth and lies. Truth is indivisible, hence it cannot recognize itself; anyone who wants to recognize it has to be a lie.

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.

A taste for truth at any cost is a passion which spares nothing.

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.

In wartime, truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies.

People have never looked so ugly as they do today. We just consume far too much.

Any man may be in good spirits and good temper when he’s well dressed. There ain’t much credit in that.

It is only a man’s own fundamental thoughts that have truth and life in them. For it is these that he really and completely understands. To read the thoughts of others is like taking the remains of someone else’s meal, like putting on the discarded clothes of a stranger.

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

Men have to do some awfully mean things to keep up their respectability.

Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth.

The truth of things is the chief nutriment of superior intellects.

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

The biggest problem with every art is by the use of appearance to create a loftier reality.

In everything truth surpasses the imitation and copy.

No legacy is so rich as honesty.

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 truth. It is a beautiful and terrible thing, and must therefore be treated with great caution.

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

A great social success is a pretty girl who plays her cards as carefully as if she were plain.

If you seek truth you will not seek victory by dishonorable means, and if you find truth you will become invincible.

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

I am a firm believer in the people. If given the truth, they can be depended upon to meet any national crisis. The great point is to bring them the real facts.

All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.

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.

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

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

You’d be surprised how much it costs to look this cheap!