Truth

"It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble. It's what you know for sure that just ain't so." Mark Twain

"It is well known that in war, the first casualty is truth - that during any war truth is forsaken for propaganda." Harry Edson Browne

"The truth does not require your participation to exist. Bullshit does" Terence McKenna

"Being in a minority, even in a minority of one, did not make you mad. There was truth and there was untruth, and if you clung to the truth even against the whole world, you were not mad." George Orwell

"The point is that we are all capable of believing things which we know to be untrue, and then, when we are finally proved wrong, impudently twisting the facts so as to show that we were right. Intellectually, it is possible to carry on this process for an indefinite time: the only check on it is that sooner or later a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield." George Orwell

"If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State." Joseph Goebbels

"Nine times out of ten, in the arts as in life, there is actually no truth to be discovered; there is only error to be exposed." H. L. Mencken

"If the world is upside down the way it is now, wouldn't we have to turn it over to get it to stand up straight?" Eduardo Galeano

"For the great enemy of truth is very often not the lie--deliberate, contrived and dishonest--but the myth--persistent, persuasive, and unrealistic. Too often we hold fast to the cliches of our forebears. We subject all facts to a prefabricated set of interpretations. We enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought." John F. Kennedy

"Sometimes people don't want to hear the truth because they don't want their illusions destroyed." Friedrich Nietzsche

"The simplest and most familiar truth seems new and wonderful the instant we ourselves experience it for the first time." Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach

"All generalizations are false, including this one." Mark Twain

"The highest conceivable degree of lying is reached when judgment between truth and falsehood ceases and the liar believes his own lie and is indignant that others place doubt in his words." Franz von Holtzendorff

"Error is indeed our enemy, but it alone points to the truth and therefore deserves our respectful treatment." Allan Bloom