Truth

The truth will set you free. But not until it is finished with you.

Even the clearest and most perfectcircumstantial evidence is likely to be at fault, after all, and therefore ought to be received with great caution. Take the case of any pencil, sharpened by any woman: if you have witnesses, you will find she did it with a knife; but if you take simply the aspect of the pencil, you will say she did it with her teeth.

Tell the truth or trump—but get the trick.

Now they accuse me of going up and down the Nation on a whistlestop train, and the slogansthat they hurl at me most of the time are “Give’em hell, Harry.” That reputation I did not earn. All I do is to tell them [the Republicans] thetruth, and that hurts a lot worse than giving them hell.

We do not seek for truth in the abstract. . . .

A few months ago I told the American people I did not trade arms for hostages. My heart and my best intentions still tell me that is true, but the facts and the evidence tell me it is not.

And when memory failed and written records were falsified—when that happened, the claim of the Party to have improved the conditions of human life had got to be accepted, because there did not exist, and never again could exist, any standard against which it could be tested.

Nazi theory indeed specifically denies that such a thing as “the truth” exists. . . . The implied objective of this line of thought is a nightmare world in which the Leader, or some ruling clique, controls not only the future but the past . If the Leader says of such and such an event, “It never happened”—well, it never happened. If he says that two and two are five—well, two and two are five. This prospect frightens me much more than bombs.

I know it is the fashion to say that most of recorded history is lies anyway. I am willing to believe that history is for the most part inaccurate and biased, but what is peculiar to our own age is the abandonment of the idea that history could be truthfully written.

It is precisely facts that do not exist, only interpretations .

What is originality? To see something that has no name as yet and hence cannot be mentioned although it stares us all in the face. The way men usually are, it takes a name to make something visible for them.

Grow your tree of falsehood from a small grain of truth.

The public . . . demands certainties. . . . But there are no certainties.

The virulence of the national appetite for bogus revelation.

What I want is to draw inspiration only from the truth. . . . My qualifications for this important role include a large head, an enormous nose, disappointment in love, and expectations of ill health.

Most of the greatest evils that man has inflicted upon man have come through people feeling quite certain about something which, in fact, was false.

A half-truth is the worst of all lies, because it can be defended in partiality.

It's not a matter of what is true that counts but a matter of what is perceived to be true.

The liar's punishment is not in the least that he is not believed, but that he cannot believe anyone else.

I'm not smart enough to lie.

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

Lying is done with words and also with silence.

When my information changes, I alter my conclusions. What do you do, sir?

By doubting we come at truth.