Truth Quotes – Insights on Reality and Honesty

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

Thomas Jefferson

"The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist."

Hannah Arendt

"Being honest may not get you a lot of friends but it’ll always get you the right ones."

John Lennon

"Peace is only possible through freedom, freedom only through truth. Therefore, untruth is the real evil that destroys all peace: untruth ranging from concealment to blind indifference, from lies to inner dishonesty, from thoughtlessness to doctrinaire fanaticism, from the untruthfulness of the individual to the untruthfulness of the public sphere."

Karl Jaspers

"People are different, but the truth is one, and all who seek it, in whatever field, help one another."

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

"When people choose to believe a lie, their thinking becomes distorted and twisted because they have to distort the facts to fit their beliefs. Their thinking is blocked. And part of them knows that they have chosen a lie, creating deep tension within them as they try to hide from themselves that they have chosen the lie. The truth then becomes a terrible threat to the false personality built on the lie, and the anger and force with which they attack is proportional to their fear of self-exposure."

Henry See

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

Arthur Schopenhauer

"I’ve come to realize that the biggest problem anywhere in the world is that people’s perceptions of reality are compulsively filtered through the screening mesh of what they want, and do not want, to be true."

Travis Walton

"Freedom depends on the truthfulness of the information that guides us"

Walter Lippmann

"There can be no liberty for a community which lacks the means by which to detect lies"

Walter Lippmann

"The road to tyranny, we must never forget, begins with the destruction of the truth."

Bill Clinton

"The core of science is not controlled experiment or mathetical modeling; it is intellectual honesty. It is time we acknowledge a basic feature of human discourse: when considering the truth of a proposition, one is either engaged in an honest appraisal of the evidence and logical arguments, or one isn't."

Sam Harris

"The greatest triumphs of propaganda have been accomplished, not by doing something, but by refraining from doing. Great is truth, but still greater, from a practical point of view, is silence about truth."

Aldous Huxley

"There are two histories: the official history, the false one that is taught, the history ‘ad usum delphini’; and then the secret history, which reveals the true causes of events, a shameful history."

Honoré de Balzac

"…life in the system is so thoroughly permeated with hypocrisy and lies…Because the regime is captive to its own lies it must falsify everything. It falsifies the past. It falsifies the present, and it falsifies the future. It falsifies statistics."

Vaclav Havel

"To your request of my opinion of the manner in which a newspaper should be conducted, so as to be most useful, I should answer, “by restraining it to true facts & sound principles only.” Yet I fear such a paper would find few subscribers. It is a melancholy truth, that a suppression of the press could not more compleatly deprive the nation of it’s benefits, than is done by it’s abandoned prostitution to falsehood. Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper. Truth itself becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle. The real extent of this state of misinformation is known only to those who are in situations to confront facts within their knowledge with the lies of the day. I really look with commiseration over the great body of my fellow citizens, who, reading newspapers, live & die in the belief, that they have known something of what has been passing in the world in their time; whereas the accounts they have read in newspapers are just as true a history of any other period of the world as of the present, except that the real names of the day are affixed to their fables. General facts may indeed be collected from them, such as that Europe is now at war, that Bonaparte has been a successful warrior, that he has subjected a great portion of Europe to his will, &c., &c.; but no details can be relied on. I will add, that the man who never looks into a newspaper is better informed than he who reads them; inasmuch as he who knows nothing is nearer to truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods & errors. He who reads nothing will still learn the great facts, and the details are all false."

Thomas Jefferson

"Hollywood, land of fiction and history revisionism wouldn’t produce a product of truth even if it was profitable; neither would its kissing cousins, the media and the publishing industry."

Walter Grant

"The press, or at least most of it, has lost the passion, the outrage, and the sense of mission that once drove reporters to defy authority and tell the truth."

Chris Hedges