Telling The Truth Quotes

We often want one thing and pray for another, not telling the truth even to the gods.

I'd always thought telling the truth to other people was hard, but maybe that was a snap compared to telling the truth to yourself. Sometimes we just refused to know what we knew.

Stop telling the truth about my record!

A pessimist is a man who tells the truth prematurely.

There are few reasons for telling the truth, but for lying the number is infinite.

Tell the truth. All the time. About everything. What's the alternative to radical honesty? Waste. Wasted time, wasted money, wasted possibilities-a wasted life.

I don't think telling the truth ever gets anyone in trouble in the long run. Maybe the day after, but not in the long run.

It's difficult to tell the truth about how a book begins. The truth, as far as it can be presented to other people, is either wholly banal or too intimate.

No one tells the truth to people they don't actually know, and if they do it is a horrible trait. Everyone wants something smaller, something neater than the truth.

One can lie with the mouth, but with the accompanying grimace one nevertheless tells the truth.

All good writers speak in honest voices and tell the truth.

You can't be both a writer and a politician, at least not a good writer. A writer must always tell the truth as he sees it. And the politician must never give the game away.

You can't be reluctant to give up your lie and still tell the truth.

You can't undo anything you've already done, but you can face up to it. You can tell the truth. You can seek forgiveness. And then let God do the rest.

It takes few words to tell the truth.

Therefore, faithful Christian, seek the truth, listen to the truth, learn the truth, love the truth, tell the truth, learn the truth, defend the truth even to death.

I am strong-willed, and I am driven, and I am passionate... but I don't have... a central cause... a motivating cause, I don't know what that would be... other than trying to tell the truth when I work.

We didn't exactly believe your story.' Then --?' 'We believed your two hundred dollars.' 'You mean --' She seemed not to know what he meant. 'I mean that you paid us more than if you'd been telling the truth,' he explained blandly, 'and enough more to make it all right.

Patriotism means to stand by the country. It does not mean to stand by the president or any other public official, save exactly to the degree in which he himself stands by the country. It is patriotic to support him insofar as he efficiently serves the country. It is unpatriotic not to oppose him to the exact extent that by inefficiency or otherwise he fails in his duty to stand by the country. In either event, it is unpatriotic not to tell the truth, whether about the president or anyone else.

It is worse for a liar to tell the truth than for a lover of truth to lie.... There is a truth which is of Satan. Its essence is that under the semblance of truth it denies everything that is real. It lives upon hatred of the real world which is created and loved by God.

We're constantly getting these messages to mind our own business and look the other way if we want to be well liked, to not tell the truth or speak our mind or say anything too intense. Well, I'm telling you here that this approach not only makes you party to other people's crimes against themselves but is a prescription for mediocrity and delusion

What I respect about my dad is he comes forth and he tells the truth, and he's a very honorable person, I respect him a lot. He, I know deep down, has a good heart.

The literary gift is a very dangerous gift to possess if you are not telling the truth, and I would a great deal rather, for my part, have a man stumble in his speech than to feel he was so exceedingly smooth that he had better be watched both day and night.

But we never tell the truth. We cannot properly 'tell' the truth, because our words are crude tools to express something, 'the truth', which may well exist, but which we cannot define.

I don't know much about creative writing programs. But they're not telling the truth if they don't teach, one, that writing is hard work and, two, that you have to give up a great deal of life, your personal life, to be a writer.

What generally happens in this county is that our politicians don't serve us well because they don't tell the truth, and they don't keep their promises.

Come little cottage girl, you seem to want my cup of tea; and will you take a little cream? Now tell the truth to me!

Political correctness is an intellectual sickness. It means lying when telling the truth is not expedient. It is a disgusting habit and yet it is so widespread and so common that it is considered to be normal.

The Democratic Party is very afraid of having competition that is actually unmuzzled and that can tell the truth, which is why they keep this fear voting system in place.

It is better to be divided by truth than to be united in error. It is better to speak the truth that hurts and then heals, than falsehood that comforts and then kills. It is better to be hated for telling the truth than to be loved for telling a lie. It is better to stand alone with the truth, than to be wrong with a multitude. It is better to ultimately succeed with the truth than to temporarily succeed with a lie. There is only one Gospel.

It was a charming fantasy of romantics that the spies would stop spying, that political conflict would end and politicians would tell the truth. Unfortunately that has not been the case.

I could never be a career politician, because I believe in telling the truth.

Well, you know what they say. A bullet always tells the truth.

My way of joking is to tell the truth

If you will stop all searching right now and tell the truth to yourself, you will know what is known in the core of your bones. You will know it with no image of it, no concept of it, no thought of it. You will know it as that which has eternally been here. And you will know it as yourself.

For two extraordinary years I have been working on it - learning to write - but mostly learning how to tell the truth. At first it is quite impossible. You make yourself better than anybody, then worse than anybody, and when you finally come to see you are "like" everybody - that is the bitterest blow of all to the ego. But in the end it is only the truth, no matter how ugly or shameful, that is right, that fits together, that makes real people, and strangely enough - beauty.

I'm quite a good reader of people; I like to meet people, and I can tell if they're lying or not, and I've certainly had interviews with people in this radio show I've done that swear they've seen things or have had bizarre experiences with creatures, and so I think they're telling the truth.

We are living in a culture that if you criticize immorality you could be branded as a "bigot". I am going to lose a lot of support just by saying this. I am not a politician and I am not running a popularity contest. My job is to defend our world from Islam. You asked why the westerners convert to Islam and I must tell the truth as I see it. If that offends anyone, let him be offended.

When I began to talk publicly about the hatred that was in the Talmud, I was branded a hater, a bigot, and an anti-Semite by the media and by groups like the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith. The ADL is a multimillion-dollar, worldwide organization whose whole purpose is to defame and discredit those who simply tell the truth about Jewish supremacism and hatred against Gentiles.

Now comes the big question: What are you going to write about? And the equally big answer: Anything you damn well want. Anything at all .... as long as you tell the truth.

I thought, you know, I would probably not have seen that. On the other hand, he's obviously completely telling the truth. So, then what is that? That's - I wanted to explore that. And then I wanted to talk about how ideas are born. And the big question that the book asks in a number of ways about a number of things is that. How does a new idea come into the world?

The problem a guy who lies all the time faces is he never can tell when anybody else is telling the truth.

WARNING: The following is a transcript of a digital recording. In certain places, the audio quality was poor, so some words and phrases represent the author's best guesses. Where possible, illustrations of important symbols mentioned in the recording have been added. Background noises such as scuffling, hitting, and cursing by the two speakers have not been transcribed The author makes no claims for the authenticity of the recording. It seems impossible that the two young narrators are telling the truth, but you, the reader, must decide for yourself.

What I don’t like are arrogant people. We’re all equal. I don’t like it when a person assumes to be better. It angers me a little. There are a lot of people like that, but the world keeps turning. I also don’t like lies. I’m very honest. I’m always going to tell the truth. I don’t lie. I treat my friends the way I want to be treated.

I was starting to realize the extent of the problem here: everyone is always lying to each other, and even when they're trying to tell the truth, it can still be misleading or wrong. In fact, it almost always is wrong from at least one angle. I mean, the truth is really just a better class of lie.

When I look at American history and I look at what history means to me, I look at it as if it were a string of stories. And if it's told well enough and in a way that's charming and warm and with wit and humor, then it takes a bit of the edge off of it. You can still tell the truth, but if you tell it very sweetly and very warmly, it makes it go down a bit easier.

Science tries to answer the question: "How?" How do cells act in the body? How do you design an airplane that will fly faster thansound? How is a molecule of insulin constructed? Religion, by contrast, tries to answer the question: "Why?" Why was man created? Why ought I to tell the truth? Why must there be sorrow or pain or death? Science attempts to analyze how things and people and animals behave; it has no concern whether this behavior is good or bad, is purposeful or not. But religion is precisely the quest for such answers: whether an act is right or wrong, good or bad, and why.

Trying every day to tell the truth is hard. There are harder things, of course - arguably, living with lies and meaninglessness, living in despair is harder, but it's hardship disguised as luxury and easier perhaps to grow accustomed to, since truth is usually the enemy of custom. There are harder things than writing, being President Obama, for instance, and having to deal with House Republicans, or trying to fix the leak at the Fukushima reactor, these are harder, but writing is hard.

Nothing is drearier than just always telling the truth about yourself. Rousseau, who as far as I can tell was a pathological liar, made this wonderful distinction between lying, which he said there was something wrong with if you were trying to extract an advantage for yourself or evade responsibility for some nasty thing you'd done. But if all you're really trying to do is impress or keep it young or make life more vivid and interesting, go for it! There's no real harm in doing something like that. I think people can be overly saddled to the truth.

Movements are not radical. Movements are the American way. A small group of abolitionists writing and speaking eventually led to the end of slavery. A few stirred-up women brought about women's voting. The Populist movement, the Progressive movement, the anti-Vietnam War movement, the women's movement - the examples go on and on of 'little people' getting together and telling the truth about their lives. They made our government act.