Half Truth Quotes

Living out one's faith is either no way to live or the only way to live; it's either imprisonment, or the only path to freedom. It offers happiness, or it frustrates the pursuit. There is no half-love, half-religion, half-worship, half-belief, half-truth. There is no kinda-sorta.

There is little hope for us until we become tough-minded enough to break loose from the shackles of prejudice, half-truths, and downright ignorance. The shape of the world today does not permit us the luxury of soft mindedness. A nation or a civilization that continues to produce soft minded men purchases its own spiritual death on an installment plan.

The best lies are always at least partially true.

A half-truth masquerading as the whole truth becomes a complete untruth.

A lie that is half-truth is the darkest of all lies.

Half the truth is often a great lie.

There are no whole truths: All truths are half-truths.

Gossip lies nine times and tells a half truth the tenth.

Two left-handed gloves don't make a pair. Two half-truths don't make a truth.

At a time when politics deals in distortions and half truths, truth is to be found in the liberal arts. There's something afoot in this country and you are very much a part of it.

There was a distinction between lying and telling half-truths, but it was a very narrow one.

Recently I began reading my old diaries. Back to before the war. Gradually I became very depressed. The reason for that is probably that I wrote only when there were obstacles and halts to the flow of life, seldom when everything was smooth and even. ... As I read I distinctly felt what a half-truth a diary presents.

Half-truths are the devil's IOUs.

The world has long observed that small acts of immorality, if repeated, will destroy character. It is equally manifest, though never said, that uttering nonsense and half-truth without cease ends by destroying Intellect

Half-truths can be as deceptive as outright lies.

A lie which is half a truth is ever the blackest of lies.

One goes to Nature only for hints and half-truths. Her facts are crude until you have absorbed them or translated them ... It is not so much what we see as what the thing seen suggests.

Half truths were a wonderful way to inspire credibility.

A half-truth is the most cowardly of lies.

In 2004, I wrote 'What We've Lost,' a book about the Bush administration. It sold only reasonably well, in part, I think, because the book was a horrific downer, an unrelenting account of the administration's actions, bungles, deceptions, half-truths, untruths, and downright corruptions.

Life is a system of half-truths and lies, Opportunistic, convenient evasion.

Eradication of microbial disease is a will-o'-the-wisp; pursuing it leads into a morass of hazy biological concepts and half truths.

The truth is always a compound of two half- truths, and you never reach it, because there is always something more to say.

Common sense, the half-truths of a deceitful society, is honored as the honest truths of a frank world.

Sweep up the debris of decaying faith; Sweep down the cobwebs of worn-out out beliefs, And throw your soul wide open to the light of reason and of knowledge. Be not afraid To thrust aside half-truths and grasp the whole.

The tragic reality is that there have been occasions when [Mormon] Church leaders, teachers, and writers have not told the truth they knew about difficulties of the Mormon past, but have offered to the Saints instead a mixture of platitudes, half-truths, omissions, and plausible denials.

The polls demonstrate that 50 percent of Americans who get their news from TV think Saddam Hussein was behind the Twin Towers attack. Man, have they got ways for getting half-truths out right away now, thanks to TV! I think TV is a calamity in a democracy.

He [said of one or other eminent colleagues] is a very busy man, and half of what he publishes is true, but I don't know which half.

What will a Hillary Clinton presidency look like? The answer by now seems obvious: It will look like her presidential campaign, which in turn looks increasingly like the first Clinton presidency. Which is to say, high-minded ideals, lowered execution, half truths, outright lies (and imaginary flights), take-no prisoners politics, some very good policy ideas, a presidential spouse given to wallowing in anger and self-pity, and a succession of aides and surrogates pushed under the bus when things don't go right. Which is to say, often.

The misdeeds of ordinary men can be buried with them, and their lives described in half-truths that are really half-lies. But not a public man. Particularly not this one.

Those who don’t read the newspapers are better off than those who do insofar as those who know nothing are better off than those whose heads are filled with half-truths and lies.

An epigram is a half-truth so stated as to irritate the person who believes the other half.

A truth that's told with bad intent beats all the lies you can invent.

The purpose of satire has been rightly stated as to strip off the veneer of comforting illusion and cosy half truth, and our job, as I see it, is to put it back again!

Seek the truth in all fields, and in that search you will need at least three virtues: courage, zest and modesty. The ancients put that thought in the form of a prayer. They said, “From the cowardice that shrinks from new truth, from the laziness that is content with half truth, from the arrogance that thinks it has all truth – O God of truth, deliver us.

Just as Socrates felt that it was necessary to create a tension in the mind so that individuals could rise from the bondage of myths and half-truths to the unfettered realm of creative analysis and objective appraisal, so must we see the need for nonviolent gadflies to create the kind of tension in society that will help men rise from the dark depths of prejudice and racism to majestic heights of understanding and brotherhood.

That 'change makes us uncomfortable' is now one of the most widely promoted, widely accepted, and under-considered half-truths around. [I]t is not change by itself that makes us uncomfortable; it is not even change that involves taking on something very difficult. Rather, it is change that leaves us feeling defenseless before the dangers we 'know' to be present that causes us anxiety.

In battling evil, excess is good; for he who is moderate in announcing the truth is presenting half-truth. He conceals the other half out of fear of people's wrath.

The ancient sages never put their teachings in a systematic form. They spoke in paradoxes, for they were afraid of uttering half-truths. They began by talking like fools and ended by making their hearers wise.

Both in verse and in prose [Karl] Shapiro loves, partly out of indignation and partly out of sheer mischievousness, to tell the naked truths or half-truths or quarter-truths that will make anybody's hair stand on end; he is always crying: "But he hasn't any clothes on!" about an emperor who is half the time surprisingly well-dressed.

If people depend on me to be a man of truth, I have to prove again and again and again and again that I am a man of truth. It cannot be that on Monday I am a man of truth, on Tuesday I speak three-quarters truth, Wednesday I speak half-truth, on Thursday I speak one-quarter truth, on Friday I don't speak at all, and on Saturday I can't even think how to speak the truth.

It is notorious that we speak no more than half-truths in our ordinary conversation, and even a soliloquy is likely to be affected by the apprehension that walls have ears.

We make no apology then for raising our voices loud to a world that is ripening in sin the lord has said,” Say nothing but repentance unto this generation; The adversary is subtle, cunning, he knows that he cannot induce good men and women immediately to do major evils so he moves slyly, whispering half truths until he has his intended victims following him finally he clamps his chains upon them and fetters them tight, and then he laughs at their discomfiture and their misery.

The Adlerians, in the name of "individual psychology," take the side of society against the individual. ... Adler's later thought succumbs to the worst of his earlier banalization. It is conventional, practical, and moralistic. "Our science ... is based on common sense." Common sense, the half-truths of a deceitful society, is honored as the honest truths of a frank world.

The Ten Commandments are for lame brains. The first five are solely for the benefit of the priests and the powers that be; the second five are half truths, neither complete nor adequate.

Guys, I don't want to tell you half-truths, unless they're completely accurate.

[...] it is generally accepted that the Civil War was fought over the issue of slavery. That, at best, is a half-truth. Slavery was an issue, but the primary force for war was a clash between the economic interests of the North and the South. Even the issue of slavery itself was based on economics.

In an average day, you may well be confronted with some species of bullying or bigotry, or some ill-phrased appeal to the general will, or some petty abuse of authority. If you have a political loyalty, you may be offered a shady reason for agreeing to a lie or a half-truth that serves some short-term purpose. Everybody devises tactics for getting through such moments; try behaving "as if" they need not be tolerated and are not inevitable.

To persuade thinking persons in Eastern Europe that Central American Marxists - the Sandinistas, the guerillas in El Salvador - are in absurd and tragic error is not difficult. Poles and Czechs and Hungarians can hardly believe, after what they experienced under socialism, that other human beings would fall for the same bundle of lies, half-truths, and distortions. Sadly, however, illusion is often sweeter to human taste than reality. The last marxist in the world will probably be an American nun.

As the places where Americans dwell become evermore depressing and impossible, Disneyworld is where they escape to worship the nation in the abstract, a cartoon capital of a cartoon republic enshrining the falsehoods, half-truths, and delusions that prop up the squishy thing the national character has become--for instance, that we are a nation of families; that we care about our fellow citizens; that history matters; that there is a place called home.