Truth

"The truth , when it arrives is always different from what we thought it would be..if we imagine that we already know the truth, that imaginations based on old and habitual ideas. But the truth is always something entirely new to the mind; so we cannot possibly imagine it. Just as we cannot know what a new day is like before we experience it, we cannot think accurately about a new truth until we first live it. As we dare to drop our conditioned opinions, we make room for the truth..." Vernon Howard

"One cannot be too extreme in dealing with social ills; the extreme thing is generally the true thing." Emma Goldman

"A fact-checking agency often serves as an instrument of censorship. The reason someone finances such an agency is to review and control certain press products and other media. The main motivation behind it is to instill in the public what is true or false, and to portray others' statements as questionable, obscure, or unreliable. This serves to morally polarize the political discourse by granting a seal of approval to some statements and not to others. One can truly recognize these institutions as part of a repressive discourse environment only when one recognizes this moralism. The various methods by which political discussions are redirected into a negotiation about the truth, which one is now either allowed to acknowledge, or else one is a dissenter, a conspiracy theorist, a denier of something." Michael Andrick

"People accept the facts which come to them through existing channels. They like to hear new things in accustomed ways. They have neither the time nor the inclination to search for facts that are not readily available to them." Edward Bernays

"I believe that it is better to tell the truth than a lie. I believe it is better to be free than to be a slave. And I believe it is better to know than to be ignorant." Henry Louis Mencken

"The truth that survives is simply the lie that is pleasantest to believe." Henry Louis Mencken

"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

"Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows." 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

"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