Truth Quotes – Insights on Reality and Honesty

"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

"We have a chancellor who is a liar."

Christian Olearius

"A lie is like a snowball: the longer you roll it, the bigger it gets."

Martin Luther

"And so, one must keep repeating the truth, because error is constantly being preached all around us as well—not by individuals, but by the masses. In newspapers and encyclopedias, in schools and universities—everywhere error is on top, and it feels comfortable and at ease, in the awareness of the majority that is on its side."

Wolfgang von Goethe

"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