Truth

One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.

If decade after decade the truth cannot be told, each person’s mind begins to roam irretrievably. One’s fellow countrymen become harder to understand than Martians.

It’s discouraging to think how many people are shocked by honesty and how few by deceit.

Everything that deceives may be said to enchant.

Now, what I want is Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else. You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon Facts: nothing else will ever be of any service to them. This is the principle on which I bring up my own children, and this is the principle on which I bring up these children. Stick to Facts, sir!

Talking much about oneself may be a way of hiding oneself.

Truthfulness has never been counted among the political virtues, and lies have always been regarded as justifiable tools in political dealings.

I think if the people of this country can be reached with the truth, their judgment will be in favor of the many, as against the privileged few.

The true hypocrite is the one who ceases to perceive his deception, the one who lies with sincerity.

Repetition does not transform a lie into a truth.

The peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error.

Where is there dignity unless there is honesty?

The result of a consistent and total substitution of lies for factual truth is not that the lie will now be accepted as truth and truth be defamed as a lie, but that the sense by which we take our bearings in the real world—and the category of truth versus falsehood is among the mental means to this end—is being destroyed.

In the end the Party would announce that two and two made five, and you would have to believe it. It was inevitable that they should make that claim sooner or later: the logic of their position demanded it. Not merely the validity of experience, but the very existence of external reality, was tacitly denied by their philosophy. The heresy of heresies was common sense.

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

Fiction is Truth’s elder sister. Obviously. No one in the world knew what truth was till somebody had told a story.

Blessed is he whose fame does not outshine his truth.

Let us not underrate the value of a fact; it will one day flower in a truth.

If a man will kick a fact out of the window, when he comes back he finds it again in the chimney corner.

Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.

In the spider-web of facts, many a truth is strangled.

and sometimes even better than, the establishing of a new truth or fact.

To rise from error to truth is rare and beautiful.

If you only hear one side of the story, you have no understanding at all.