Truth

"There are no whole truths: All truths are half-truths." Alfred North Whitehead

"For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong." Henry Louis Mencken

"Legend: A lie that has attained the dignity of age." H. L. Mencken

"There is a perennial and unobtrusive view that morality consists in such things as telling the truth, paying one's debts, respecting one's parents and doing no voluntary harm to anyone. Those are all things easy to say and hard to do; they do not attract much attention, and win little honor in the world." Allan Bloom

"The real community of man, in the midst of all the self-contradictory simulacra of community, is the community of those who seek the truth, of the potential knowers, that is, in principle, of all men to the extent they desire to know. But in fact this includes only a few, the true friends, as Plato was to Aristotle at the very moment they were disagreeing about the nature of the good." Allan Bloom

"There's no such thing as love; only proof of love." Jean Cocteau

"The counterfeit trinity is me, myself, and I." Edwin Louis Cole

"In the society of illusion, reality must manifest itself. The story songs of Joel Rafael are that manifestation... the essence of minstrel." John Trudell

"Beauty is, in some way, boring. Even if its concept changes through the ages... a beautiful object must always follow certain rules. A beautiful nose shouldn't be longer than that or shorter than that, on the contrary, an ugly nose can be as long as the one of Pinocchio, or as big as the trunk of an elephant, or like the beak of an eagle, and so ugliness is unpredictable, and offers an infinite range of possibility. Beauty is finite, ugliness is infinite like God." Umberto Eco

"Since my moral system rests on my accepted version of the facts, he who denies my moral judgments or my version of the facts, is to me perverse, alien, dangerous. How shall I account for him? The opponent has always to be explained, and the last explanation that we ever look for is that he sees a different set of facts. Such an explanation we avoid, because it saps the very foundation of our own assurance that we have seen life steadily and seen it whole." Walter Lippmann

"The real being of language is that into which we are taken up when we hear it - what is said." Hans-Georg Gadamer

"Truth was never the highest priority of human society. It was the highest priority of some individuals, but never of society as a whole — because society as a whole does not function on the basis of truth. If you take two of the most powerful institutions of humankind — science and the scientific community, and religion and churches — neither of them has truth as their chief value. For individuals, yes. But as institutions, no. The chief value of science is power. The chief value of religion is order — organization. Religion is all about maintaining order in society, and science is mainly about gaining power." Yuval Noah Harari

"In real life it is always the anvil that breaks the hammer." George Orwell

"Many a time I have wanted to stop talking and find out what I really believed." Walter Lippmann