Truth is mighty and will prevail. There is nothing wrong with this, except that it ain’t so.

When you’re writing a novel, you don’t want the reader to come out of it voting yes or no to some question. Life is more complicated than that. Reality simply consists of different points of view.

There is not a truth existing which I fear… or would wish unknown to the whole world.

The truth is lived, not taught.

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

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.

On the mountains of truth you can never climb in vain: either you will reach a point higher up today, or you will be training your powers so that you will be able to climb higher tomorrow.

People need good lies. There are too many bad ones.

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.

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

The man of life upright has a guiltless heart, free from all dishonest deeds or thought of vanity.

Truthful words are not beautiful; beautiful words are not truthful. Good words are not persuasive; persuasive words are not good.

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.

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

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

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

What is truth? said jesting Pilate; and would not stay for an answer.

Time discovers truth.

If someone lies, well, you had a choice to trust that person or not. I think the way my father raised me, well, he trusted everybody. And that worked for him.

Society has always to demand a little more from human beings than it will get in practice.

It is error alone which needs the support of government. Truth can stand by itself.

It is far better to grasp the universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring.

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.

All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream.

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

Our character is what we do when we think no one is looking.

Anger cannot be dishonest.

It is far harder to kill a phantom than a reality.

Appearance is something absolute, but reality is not that way – everything is interdependent, not absolute. So that view is very helpful to maintain a peace of mind because the main destroyer of a peaceful mind is anger.

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.

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

Speak the truth, and all things alive or brute are vouchers, and the very roots of the grass underground there, do seem to stir and move to bear you witness.

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

Make yourself an honest man, and then you may be sure there is one less rascal in the world.

Not when truth is dirty, but when it is shallow, does the enlightened man dislike to wade into its waters.

If we hope for what we are not likely to possess, we act and think in vain, and make life a greater dream and shadow than it really is.

The earth is supported by the power of truth; it is the power of truth that makes the sun shine and the winds blow; indeed all things rest upon truth.

Only on paper has humanity yet achieved glory, beauty, truth, knowledge, virtue, and abiding love.

A frustration I have is that a lot of people increasingly seem to equate an advertising business model with somehow being out of alignment with your customers. I think it’s the most ridiculous concept.

All cruel people describe themselves as paragons of frankness.

Contradiction is not a sign of falsity, nor the lack of contradiction a sign of truth.

Few men have virtue to withstand the highest bidder.

In the consciousness of the truth he has perceived, man now sees everywhere only the awfulness or the absurdity of existence and loathing seizes him.

Honesty is the best policy.

Truth is a pathless land.

They dream in courtship, but in wedlock wake.

No public man can be just a little crooked.

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.

Truth is the beginning of every good to the gods, and of every good to man.

Life is never fair, and perhaps it is a good thing for most of us that it is not.

All men are frauds. The only difference between them is that some admit it. I myself deny it.

I’ve got nothing to hide.

The darkness is really out there. It’s not something that’s in my head, just. It’s in my work because it’s in the world.

And whether you’re an honest man, or whether you’re a thief, depends on whose solicitor has given me my brief.

Memories are thoughts that arise. They’re not realities. Only when you believe that they are real, then they have the power over you. But when you realize it’s just another thought arising about the past, then you can have a spacious relationship with that thought. The thought no longer has you in its grip.

Piety requires us to honor truth above our friends.

Where there is shouting, there is no true knowledge.

Time is precious, but truth is more precious than time.

Life is a series of natural and spontaneous changes. Don’t resist them – that only creates sorrow. Let reality be reality. Let things flow naturally forward in whatever way they like.

An honest man’s the noblest work of God.

If you ever injected truth into politics you have no politics.