Truth

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

"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

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

"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 idea, shared by many, that life is a vale of tears, is just as false as the idea shared by the great majority, the idea to which youth and health and riches incline you, that life is a place of entertainment. Life is a place of service, and in that service one has to suffer a great deal that is hard to bear, but more often to experience a great deal of joy. But that joy can be real only if people look upon their life as a service, and have a definite object in life outside themselves and their personal happiness." Leo Tolstoi

"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

"Nothing is beautiful, only man: on this piece of naivete rests all aesthetics, it is the first truth of aesthetics. Let us immediately add its second: nothing is ugly but degenerate man - the domain of aesthetic judgment is therewith defined." Friedrich Nietzsche

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

"Property is impossible." Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

"There is no god and there is no soul. Hence, there is no need for the props of traditional religion. With dogma and creed excluded, then immutable truth is dead and buried. There is no room for fixed and natural law or permanent moral absolutes." John Dewey

"If reality impacted directly on our senses and our consciousness, if we could have direct communication between the material world and ourselves, art would be unnecessary." Henri-Louis Bergson

"Politics is a romantic search for the good and the true and the beautiful." James M. Buchanan