Truth

"The first way to know something is, of course, through personal experience. You know that your living room is painted green because you’ve been in your living room and saw that it was green. (I won’t worry here about things like how you know you aren’t dreaming or insane or such.) Similarly you know what a bird is, how gravity works (again, in an everyday sense), and how to get to the nearest shopping mall, all by direct experience. The second way to know things is by authority. That is, you rely on some source of information, believing it to be reliable, when you have no experience of your own. So almost every person who has gone to school believes that the earth goes around the sun, even though very few people would be able to tell you how anybody could even detect that motion. You are relying on authority if, when asked if you know the way to San Jose, you answer yes and pull out a map. You might be able to personally test the map’s reliability by using it to navigate to San Jose, but until you do you are relying on authority. Many people believe democracy is superior to other forms of government even though they haven’t lived under any other type. They rely on the authority of textbooks and politicians, and perhaps on verbal or pictorial descriptions of what it’s like in other societies. Of course other societies do the same, and most of their defenders rely on authority." Michael J. Behe

"Is any of it real? I mean, look at this, look at it! A world built on fantasy! Synthetic emotions in the form of pills! Psychological warfare in the form of advertising! Mind altering chemicals in the form of food! Brainwashing seminars in the form of media! Controlled isolated bubbles in the form of social networks. Real? You want to talk about reality? We haven't lived in anything remotely close to it since the turn of the century! We turned it off, took out the batteries, snacked on a bag of GMOs, while we tossed the remnants into the ever expanding dumpster of the human condition. We live in branded houses, trademarked by corporations, built on bipolar numbers, jumping up and down on digital displays, hypnotizing us into the biggest slumber mankind has ever seen. You'd have to dig pretty deep, kiddo, before you can find anything real. We live in a kingdom of bullshit, that even you have lived in for far too long. So don't tell me about not being real: I'm no less real than the fucking beef patty in your big mac. As far as you are concerned, Elliot, I am very real. We are all together now, whether you like it or not." Christian Slater

"If you want to tell people the truth, make them laugh, otherwise they'll kill you." Oscar Wilde

"The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it emotionally. A higher paradox confounds the emotion as well as reason and there are long periods in the lives of all of us, when the truth as revealed by faith is hideous, emotionally disturbing, downright repulsive. Witness the dark night of the soul in individual saints . . ." Flannery O’Connor

"Science itself is dead. The university has become a brothel of third-party funding. I mean that quite seriously — a colleague of mine once said this when her rector at a university in the Ruhr region drove away in a sports car wearing a gold chain. We each have our little room there, and we make a career if we let ourselves be used by whoever provides the funding. In other words, the agenda and the criteria for quality are outsourced. The criterion of truth becomes corrupted by the criterion of external funding. Not everyone who accepts external funding behaves this way, of course. But the metaphor of the brothel was meant to illustrate that love can be corrupted when it becomes something that can be bought — and that science can be corrupted when it becomes something that can be bought." Matthias Burchardt

"Now, my predecessor loved precision. His matrix consisted only of pedantic facts and equations. He hated the human mind. So he never bothered to understand that you don’t give a damn about facts. It’s all about fiction. The only world that matters is the one inside here. And you people believe the craziest shit. And why? What confirms your fictions and makes them real? Feelings." Neil Patrick Harris

"The real terror of totalitarianism is not that it commits atrocities, but that it attacks the concept of objective truth; it claims to control both the past and the future." George Orwell

"For the habitual truth-teller and truth-seeker, indeed, the whole world has very little liking. He is always unpopular." H. L. Mencken

"Many tired old lies are being fed to secondary and college students through their textbooks and their brainwashed teachers, and to the general public through television receivers and daily newspapers. Despite the well-entrenched position of the pseudoscientists and their powerful allies in politics and the communications media, encouraging progress is being made by some scientists. Bit by bit the truth is emerging and the forces of censorship, moral intimidation and liberal bigotry are losing ground." MOYO-Film

"But it’s no good getting hung up about them because the main thing is to get the kids. You know, this is the Catholic trick — they nail you when you’re young and brainwash you, and then they’ve got you for the rest of your life. In actual fact, do this sort of thing — but brainwash people with the truth" George Harrison

"Our task is not to tell the truth; we are opinion molders." Walter Cronkite Jr.

"The news and the truth are not the same thing." Walter Lippmann

"In the long run, even the most efficiently organized propaganda can do nothing against the truth." Albert Schweitzer

"One of the greatest tragedies of life is the murder of a beautiful theory by a gang of brutal facts." Benjamin Franklin