... Television is a god-damned amusement park; television is a circus, a carnival, a travelling troop of acrobats, story-tellers, dancers, singers, jugglers, sideshow freaks, lion-tamers and football players – we’re in the boredom-killing business. So if you want the truth go to God. Go to your gurus. Go to yourselves! Because that’s the only place you’re ever going to find any real truth. But, man, you’re never going to get any truth from us. We’ll tell you anything you want to hear. We’ll lie like hell ... We’ll tell you any shit you want to hear. We deal in illusions, man! None of it is true! But you people sit there day after day, night after night, all ages, colors, creeds, where are you now? You’re beginning to believe the illusions we’re spinning here. You’re beginning to think that the tube is reality and that your own lives are unreal. You do whatever the tube tells you. You dress like a tube. You eat like a tube. You raise your children like a tube. You even think like the tube. This is mass madness, you maniacs! In God’s name: you people are the reality! We are the illusion! Network 1976 starring Faye Dunaway & Peter Finch & William Holden & Robert Duvall & Ned Beatty & Wesley Addy & Beatrice Straight & Jordan Charney & William Prince & Lane Smith et al, director Sidney Lumet
What the hell should I know about the Truth? ibid.
There are no whole truths; all truths are half-truths. It is trying to treat them as whole truths that plays the devil. Alfred North Whitehead, Dialogues, 1954
It is rigid dogma that destroys truth; and, please notice, my emphasis is not on the dogma, but on the rigidity. When men say of any question, ‘This is all there is to be known or said of the subject; investigation ends here,’ that is death. It may be that the mischief comes not from the thinker but for the use made of his thinking by late-comers. Aristotle, for example, gave us our scientific technique ... yet his logical propositions, his instruction in sound reasoning which was bequeathed to Europe, are valid only within the limited framework of formal logic, and, as used in Europe, they stultified the minds of whole generations of mediaeval Schoolmen. Aristotle invented science, but destroyed philosophy. ibid.
You can tell the deepest truths with the lies of fiction. Isabel Allende
In a time of universal deceit – telling the truth is a revolutionary act. George Orwell, disputed quotation, attributions & variations
However much you deny the truth, the truth goes on existing. George Orwell, Facing Unpleasant Facts: Narrative Essays
Truth exists, only falsehood has to be invented. Georges Braque, 1882-1963
It is fitting for us not to be ashamed of acknowledging truth, and to assimilate it from whatever source it comes to us. There is nothing of higher value than truth itself. It never cheapens or abases he who seeks. Al-Kindi, cited Jim Al-Khalili, Science & Islam, BBC 2009
There is no other way for securing yourself against flatteries except that men understand that they do not offend you by telling you the truth; but when everybody can tell you the truth, you fail to get respect. Niccolo Machiavelli
Trouthe is the hyest that man may kepe. Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales
Though all the winds of doctrine were let loose to play upon the earth, so Truth be in the field, we do injuriously by licensing and prohibiting to misdoubt her strength. Let her and Falsehood grapple; who ever knew Truth put to the worse, in a free and open encounter. John Milton, Areopagitica, 1644
Beholding the bright countenance of truth in the quiet and still air of delightful studies. John Milton, The Reason of Church Government, 1642
To be still searching what we know not, by what we know, still closing up truth to truth as we find it (for all her body is homogeneal and proportional), that is the golden rule of theology as well as in arithmetic, and makes up the best harmony in a church. John Milton, Areopagitica, 1644
Truth is not merely what we are thinking, but also why, to whom and under what circumstances we say it. Vaclav Havel, Temptation, 1985
Why should truth not be impress’d
Beneath the cover of a jest. Horace, Satires
So that, you know, I was eager to distinguish the straight from the crooked, and to hunt for truth in the groves of Academe. Horace
Like all dreamers, I mistook disenchantment for truth. Jean-Paul Sartre, Les Mots, 1964
All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as self-evident. Arthur Schopenhauer, attributions & variations
He who does not bellow the truth when he knows the truth makes himself the accomplice of liars and forgers. Charles Peguy
Scientists should never claim something is absolutely truth. You should never claim perfect or total or 100% because you never ever get there. Beautiful Minds: Professor Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell, BBC 2010
Science is a quest for understanding. A search for truth it seems to me is full of pitfalls. ibid.
’Tis strange – but true; for truth is always strange;
Stranger than fiction. Lord Byron, Don Juan
Adversity is the first path to truth. Lord Byron
Opinions are made to be changed – or how is truth to be got at? Lord Byron
Truths that become old become decrepit and unreliable; sometimes they may be kept going artificially for a certain time, but there is no life in them. Peter Demianovich Ouspensky, A New Model of the Universe, 1934
The basis of any truly civilised society, true democracy, is Justice. Truth and Justice. John Pilger, interview Alan Hart
What is the role of media in wartime? Is it simply to record or is it to explain, and from whose point of view? John Pilger, Frontline: The Search for Truth in Wartime, ITV 1983
[William Howard] Russell was The Times’ man of the Crimea, a war which Queen Victoria described as ‘popular beyond belief’. It certainly wasn’t that after Russell had got through with it. ibid.
Falklands: The truth of that war is still coming in. Indeed, the Crimea was the last British war before censorship. ibid.
The advent of the telegraph during the American Civil War changed almost everything. ibid.
World War I: It was the big lie. There was a deliberate state-run conspiracy to lie to the British people about the futility of the war and its carnage. ibid.
Telling the truth is often difficult. And you can’t always get the whole truth. You can sometimes get bits of it. But to look for it as truthfully as you can ... at their best, journalists are truth tellers ... Once you enter the so-called mainstream you enter a structure with certain ingrained assumptions. John Pilger, Power and Responsibility
Propaganda in liberal democracies like America and Britain is much more thorough than in dictatorships and totalitarian states. No imprisonment is required, no loss of fingernails called for. There is another far more effective way: unlike totalitarian states, the conformity of information and opinion is insidious. Its sameness implicit, ingrained and even celebrated ... Technology seems to have almost anything seem possible except Truth ... Truth is always subversive, otherwise why should governments and their bureaucracies fear it so much and go to such lengths to suppress it. John Pilger, lecture July 1996, ‘The Hidden Power of the Media’
Howard Zinn describes ‘the moving train’. And that really you’re either on it or you are not. I think there are many truths that don’t have a middle. And I think we’re often given a false idea of truth. In fact, truth is not really a word that is used very much because people are a little bit uncomfortable with it and in some sense rightly so. There are often many truths. There is not a whole truth. There is not a big truth. Or sometimes maybe. John Pilger, In Conversation
There are truths. And truths are often made up by facts. And facts on the ground are terribly important ... As a reporter, if I am to draw a conclusion, as I do in my films, that conclusion must be based on evidence I’ve uncovered or I’ve seen substantiated or I’ve witnessed personally. ibid.
All conclusions are valid if they are based on facts. ibid.
This is where Lord Justice Scott conducted his Inquiry into the scandal of Britain’s arms that went illegally to Saddam Hussein. The Scott Inquiry sat for four hundred hours and gathered evidence from more than two hundred witnesses, including the government’s chief arms salesman, Ian McDonald, who said, ‘Truth is a very difficult concept.’ John Pilger, Flying the Flag (Arming the World), ITV 1994
The truth is that as soon as Thatcher took power, her ministers courted Saddam Hussein. A procession of them went to Baghdad: Lord Carrington, Cecil Parkinson, John Knott, John Biffin, Paul Channon, William Waldergrave. In 1981 Douglas Hurd tried to sell Saddam Hussein an entire air-defence system. And when in 1985 Britain banned the sales of arms to Iraq the flow of British arms and money did not stop. ibid.
There are no sacred truths. All assumptions must be critically examined. Arguments from authority are worthless. Carl Sagan & Ann Druyan, Cosmos: Who Speaks For Earth? PBS 1980
We wish to pursue the truth no matter where it leads. But to find the truth we need imagination and scepticism both. Carl Sagan & Ann Druyan, Cosmos: The Shores of the Cosmic Ocean
Finding the occasional straw of truth awash in a great ocean of confusion and bamboozle requires intelligence, vigilance, dedication and courage. But if we don’t practice these tough habits of thought, we cannot hope to solve the truly serious problems that face us – and we risk becoming a nation of suckers, up for grabs by the next charlatan who comes along. Professor Carl Sagan
For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring. Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark