Famously Said Random quote

Quotes about truth and lies

458 quotes from 240 people

Most readBy personPage 3 of 31

The least initial deviation from the truth is multiplied later a thousandfold.
Aristotle384–322 BCOn the Heavens, I.5. 271b8-10
All great truths begin as blasphemies.
George Bernard Shaw1856–1950Annajanska (1919)
There is but one straight course, and that is to seek truth and pursue it steadily.
George Washington1732–1799
For the great majority of mankind are satisfied with appearances as though they were realities. and are often more influenced by things that seem than by those that are.
Niccolò Machiavelli1469–1527
- Facts
Half the Truth is often a great Lie.
Benjamin Franklin1706–1790Poor Richard’s Almanack
God offers to every mind its choice between truth and repose. Take which you please⁠—you can never have both.
Ralph Waldo Emerson1803–1882
Of course it’s the same old story. Truth usually is the same old story.
Margaret Thatcher1925–2013
One deceit needs many others, and so the whole house is built in the air and must soon come to the ground.
Baltasar Gracián1601–1658
The greatest friend of Truth is time, her greatest enemy is Prejudice, and her constant companion Humility.
CCCharles Caleb Colton1777–1832
The degree of one’s emotions varies inversely with one’s knowledge of the facts: the less you know the hotter you get.
Bertrand Russell1872–1970Attributed to Russell in Distilled Wisdom (1964) by Alfred Armand Montapert, p. 145
- Anger
- Facts
It is impossible to calculate the moral mischief, if I may so express it, that mental lying has produced in society. When a man has so far corrupted and prostituted the chastity of his mind as to subscribe his professional belief to things he does not believe he has prepared himself for the commission of every other crime.
Thomas Paine1737–1809The Age of Reason, Part I (1793).
You only lie to two people in your life: your girlfriend and the police.
Jack Nicholsonborn 1937
Most writers regard truth as their most valuable possession, and therefore are most economical in its use.
Mark Twain1835–1910Said to portrait painter Samuel Johnson Woolf, cited in Here am I (1941), Samuel Johnson Woolf
- Writing
It is not a matter of what is true that counts, but a matter of what is perceived to be true.
Henry Kissinger1923–2023
It is dangerous to be sincere unless you are also stupid.
George Bernard Shaw1856–1950Man and Superman (1903), Maxims for Revolutionists, p. 243 Stray Sayings