Truth Quotes – Insights on Reality and Honesty

"The real terror of totalitarianism is not that it commits atrocities, but that it attacks the concept of objective truth; it claims to control both the past and the future."

George Orwell

"For the habitual truth-teller and truth-seeker, indeed, the whole world has very little liking. He is always unpopular."

H. L. Mencken

"Many tired old lies are being fed to secondary and college students through their textbooks and their brainwashed teachers, and to the general public through television receivers and daily newspapers. Despite the well-entrenched position of the pseudoscientists and their powerful allies in politics and the communications media, encouraging progress is being made by some scientists. Bit by bit the truth is emerging and the forces of censorship, moral intimidation and liberal bigotry are losing ground."

MOYO-Film

"But it’s no good getting hung up about them because the main thing is to get the kids. You know, this is the Catholic trick — they nail you when you’re young and brainwash you, and then they’ve got you for the rest of your life. In actual fact, do this sort of thing — but brainwash people with the truth"

George Harrison

"Our task is not to tell the truth; we are opinion molders."

Walter Cronkite Jr.

"The news and the truth are not the same thing."

Walter Lippmann

"In the long run, even the most efficiently organized propaganda can do nothing against the truth."

Albert Schweitzer

"One of the greatest tragedies of life is the murder of a beautiful theory by a gang of brutal facts."

Benjamin Franklin

"There is no such thing, at this stage of the world’s history in America, as an independent press. You know it and I know it. There is not one of you who dare write your honest opinions, and if you did, you know beforehand that it would never appear in print. I am paid weekly for keeping my honest opinions out of the paper I am connected with. Others of you are paid similar salaries for similar things, and any of you who would be foolish as to write honest opinions would be out on the streets looking for another job. If I allowed my honest opinions to appear in one issue of my papers, before twenty-four hours my occupation would be gone. The business of the journalist is to destroy the truth, to lie outright, to pervert, to vilify, to fawn at the feet of mammon, and to sell his country and his race for his daily bread. You know it and I know it, and what folly is this toasting an independent press? We are the jumping jacks, they pull the strings and we dance. Our talents, our possibilities and our lives are all the property of other men. We are intellectual prostitutes."

John Swinton

"The business of the journalist is to destroy the truth, to lie outright, to pervert, to vilify, to fawn at the feet of mammon, and to sell his country and his race for his daily bread. You know it and I know it,"

John Swinton

"The real truth of the matter is, as you and I know, that a financial element in the larger centers has owned the Government ever since the days of Andrew Jackson..."

Franklin D. Roosevelt

"Never is so much lied as before an election, during a war, and after the hunt."

Louis Berger

"As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain; and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality."

Albert Einstein

"Blind obedience to authority is the greatest enemy of truth."

Albert Einstein

"It is almost impossible to carry the torch of truth through a crowd without singeing somebody's beard."

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

"I know the secret of making the average American believing anything I want them to. Just let me control television. You put something on the television and it becomes reality. If the world outside the TV set contradicts the images, people start trying to change the world to make it like the TV sets images."

Hal Becker

"Time and again, we also find ourselves noticing that we live in a country that is deeply ill—in a landscape of lies—and that there are people at every level of education who will lie to the very end."

Joachim Gauck

"And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed—if all records told the same tale—then the lie passed into history and became truth. 'Who controls the past' ran the Party slogan, 'controls the future: who controls the present controls the past."

George Orwell