Echoes

You have enemies? Good. That means you've stood up for something, sometime in your life.

Truth never turns to rebuke falsehood; her own straightforwardness is the severest correction.

Plato is my friend — Aristotle is my friend — but truth is a greater friend.

When you have decided that a thing ought to be done and are doing it, never avoid being seen doing it, though many shall form an unfavorable opinion about it. For if it is not right, avoid doing the thing; but if it is right, why are you afraid of those who shall find fault wrongly?

You are neither right nor wrong because people agree with you.

The truth is rarely pure and never simple.

Truth is sought not because it is truth but because it is good.

The moment we no longer have a free press, anything can happen. What makes it possible for a totalitarian or any other dictatorship to rule is that people are not informed; how can you have an opinion if you are not informed? If everybody always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer. This is because lies, by their very nature, have to be changed, and a lying government has constantly to rewrite its own history. On the receiving end you get not only one lie — a lie which you could go on for the rest of your days — but you get a great number of lies, depending on how the political wind blows. And a people that no longer can believe anything cannot make up its mind. It is deprived not only of its capacity to act but also of its capacity to think and to judge. And with such a people you can then do what you please.

To teach superstitions as truth is a most terrible thing.

All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.

The most any one can do is to confess as candidly as he can the grounds for the faith that is in him, and leave his example to work on others as it may.

Truth will ultimately prevail where there is pains to bring it to light.

I find that those people who agree with me in believing in lying in bed as one of the greatest pleasures of life are the honest men, while those who do not believe in lying in bed are liars and actually lie a lot in the daytime, morally and physically.

The people never give up their liberties but under some delusion.

The crowd is untruth.

The truth may be puzzling. It may take some work to grapple with. It may be counterintuitive. It may contradict deeply held prejudices. It may not be consonant with what we desperately want to be true. But our preferences do not determine what's true. We have a method, and that method helps us to reach not absolute truth, only asymptotic approaches to the truth — never there, just closer and closer, always finding vast new oceans of undiscovered possibilities. Cleverly designed experiments are the key.

The greater the ignorance the greater the dogmatism.

If you tell the truth, you don't have to remember anything.

A man who lies to himself, and believes his own lies, becomes unable to recognize truth, either in himself or in anyone else, and he ends up losing respect for himself and for others. When he has no respect for anyone, he can no longer love, and in him, he yields to his impulses, indulges in the lowest form of pleasure, and behaves in the end like an animal in satisfying his vices. And it all comes from lying — to others and to yourself.

In matters of conscience, the law of majority has no place.

A very great deal more truth can become known than can be proven.

Truth is the daughter of time, not of authority.

Above all, don't lie to yourself. The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to a point that he cannot distinguish the truth within him, or around him, and so loses all respect for himself and for others.

The opposite of a correct statement is a false statement. But the opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth.

Let us not underrate the value of a fact; it will one day flower in a truth.