Truth

"It takes courage to seek the truth without knowing if you can bear it." Ernst Reinhardt

"Everything we hear is an opinion, not a fact. Everything we see is a perspective, not the truth." Marcus Aurelius

"One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back." Carl Sagan

"The masses have never thirsted after truth. They turn aside from evidence that is not to their taste, preferring to deify error, if error seduce them. Whoever can supply them with illusions is easily their master; whoever attempts to destroy their illusions is always their victim. An individual in a crowd is a grain of sand amid other grains of sand, which the wind stirs up at will." Gustave Le Bon

"No one is more hated than he who speaks the truth." Plato

"He who tells the stories rules the society." Platon

"Truth is not what you want it to be; it is what it is. And you must bend to its power or live a lie." Miyamoto Musashi

"Indeed, freedom and the capacity for disobedience are inseparable; hence any social, political, and religious system which proclaims freedom, yet stamps out disobedience, cannot speak the truth." Erich Fromm

"Controversy never convinced any man; men can be influenced by making them think for themselves, by seeming to doubt with them, by leading them as if by the hand, without their perceiving it. A good book lent to them, which they read at leisure, produces upon them surer effects, because they do not then blush to be subjugated by the superior reason of an antagonist." Voltaire

"The exact contrary of what is generally believed is often the truth." Jean de la Bruyère

"There is no such thing as philosophy-free science; there is only science whose philosophical baggage is taken on board without examination." Daniel Dennett

"He is free to evade reality, he is free to unfocus his mind and stumble blindly down any road he pleases, but not free to avoid the abyss he refuses to see." Ayn Rand

"The greatest kindness one can render to any man consists in leading him from error to truth." Thomas von Aquin

"There’s simply no polite way to tell people they’ve dedicated their lives to an illusion." Daniel Dennett