Truth

"The business of the journalist is to destroy the truth, to lie outright, to pervert, to vilify, to fawn at the feet of mammon, and to sell his country and his race for his daily bread. You know it and I know it," John Swinton

"The real truth of the matter is, as you and I know, that a financial element in the larger centers has owned the Government ever since the days of Andrew Jackson..." Franklin D. Roosevelt

"Never is so much lied as before an election, during a war, and after the hunt." Louis Berger

"As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain; and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality." Albert Einstein

"Blind obedience to authority is the greatest enemy of truth." Albert Einstein

"It is almost impossible to carry the torch of truth through a crowd without singeing somebody's beard." Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

"I know the secret of making the average American believing anything I want them to. Just let me control television. You put something on the television and it becomes reality. If the world outside the TV set contradicts the images, people start trying to change the world to make it like the TV sets images." Hal Becker

"Time and again, we also find ourselves noticing that we live in a country that is deeply ill—in a landscape of lies—and that there are people at every level of education who will lie to the very end." Joachim Gauck

"And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed—if all records told the same tale—then the lie passed into history and became truth. 'Who controls the past' ran the Party slogan, 'controls the future: who controls the present controls the past." George Orwell

"We have a chancellor who is a liar." Christian Olearius

"A lie is like a snowball: the longer you roll it, the bigger it gets." Martin Luther

"And so, one must keep repeating the truth, because error is constantly being preached all around us as well—not by individuals, but by the masses. In newspapers and encyclopedias, in schools and universities—everywhere error is on top, and it feels comfortable and at ease, in the awareness of the majority that is on its side." Wolfgang von Goethe

"It is error alone which needs the support of government. Truth can stand by itself." Thomas Jefferson

"The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist." Hannah Arendt