Don't try to have the last word. You might get it.
Robert A. Heinlein
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1. "Flattery makes friends and truth makes enemies."
Spanish proverb
Other categories: Friendship and Hostility
2. "All autobiographies are lies. I do not mean unconscious, unintentional lies: I mean deliberate lies."
George Bernard Shaw
Other categories: Egoism
3. "We all know that Prime Ministers are wedded to the truth, but like other wedded couples they sometimes live apart."
Hector Hugh Munro (Saki), "The Unbearable Bassington"
Other categories: Politics and Diplomacy
4. "If I were two-faced, would I be wearing this one?"
Abraham Lincoln
Other categories: Manners and Ethics
5. "There are more truths in twenty-four hours of a man's life than in all the philosophies."
Raoul Vaneigem, "The Revolution of Everyday Life"
Other categories: Science and Technology
6. "The best liar is he who makes the smallest amount of lying go the longest way."
Samuel Butler, "The Way of All Flesh"
7. "Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
8. "The buried truth germinates and breaks through to the light."
George Bernard Shaw, "The Doctor?s Dilemma"
9. "Hope is the only universal liar who never loses his reputation for veracity."
Robert G. Ingersoll
Other categories: Optimism and Hope
10. "I don't care what anybody says about me as long as it isn't true."
Truman Capote
Other categories: Various
11. "In our country the lie has become not just a moral category but a pillar of the State."
Alexander Solzhenitsyn
Other categories: Authority, Government
12. "The subconscious is ceaselessly murmuring, and it is by listening to these murmurs that one hears the truth."
Gaston Bachelard
13. "At twenty you have many desires which hide the truth, but beyond forty there are only real and fragile truths - your abilities and your failings."
Gérard Depardieu
Other categories: Defeates and Mistakes -:- Youth and Age
14. "All political parties die at last of swallowing their own lies."
John Arbuthnot
Other categories: Politics and Diplomacy
15. "The truth isn't always beauty, but the hunger for it is."
Nadine Gordimer
16. "How much easier it is to be critical than to be correct."
Benjamin Disraeli
Other categories: Various
17. "Truth sits upon the lips of dying men."
Matthew Arnold, "Sohrab and Rustum"
Other categories: Life and Death
18. "Truth, like climate, is common property."
Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, "Chapters from a Life"
19. "The difference between a saint and a hypocrite is that one lies for his religion, the other by it."
Minna Antrim, "Naked Truth and Veiled Allusions"
Other categories: God and Religion
20. "All truth, in the long run, is only common sense clarified."
Thomas Henry Huxley, "Collected Essays"
Other categories: Intellect, Judgement
21. "It is better for a man to go wrong in freedom than to go right in chains."
Thomas Henry Huxley, "Aphorisms and Reflections"
Other categories: Freedom and Servitude
22. "There is but one right, and the possibilities of wrong are infinite."
Thomas Henry Huxley, "Aphorisms and Reflections"
23. "You know what the critics are. If you tell the truth they only say you?re cynical and it does an author no good to get a reputation for cynicism."
William Somerset Maugham, "Cakes and Ale"
Other categories: Art and Culture
24. "One sought not absolute truth. One sought only a spool on which to wind the thread of history without breaking it."
Henry Brooks Adams, "The Education of Henry Adams"
25. "If there were only one truth, you couldn’t paint a hundred canvases on the same theme."
Pablo Picasso
Other categories: Art and Culture
26. "You mustn’t always believe what I say. Questions tempt you to tell lies, particularly when there is no answer."
Pablo Picasso
Other categories: Question and Problem
27. "Don’t use that foreign word "ideals." We have that excellent native word "lies.""
Henrik Ibsen, "The Wild Duck"
Other categories: Various
28. "The spirit of truth and the spirit of freedom—these are the pillars of society."
Henrik Ibsen, "Pillars of Society"
Other categories: Freedom and Servitude
29. "An error is the more dangerous in proportion to the degree of truth which it contains."
Henri-Frederic Amiel, "Journal Intime"
Other categories: Defeates and Mistakes
30. "For a creative writer possession of the “truth” is less important than emotional sincerity."
George Orwell, "Inside the Whale and Other Essays"
Other categories: Art and Culture
31. "To the living we owe respect, but to the dead we owe only the truth."
François-Marie Arouet (Voltaire), "Premiere Lettre sur Oedipe"
32. "It is sometimes well for a blatant error to draw attention to overmodest truths."
Jean Rostand, "The Substance of Man"
Other categories: Defeates and Mistakes
33. "In politics, yesterday’s lie is attacked only to flatter today’s."
Jean Rostand, "The Substance of Man"
Other categories: Politics and Diplomacy
34. "Proverbs are always platitudes until you have personally experienced the truth of them."
Aldous Huxley, "Jesting Pilate"
Other categories: Wisdom and Stupidity
35. "New knowledge is the most valuable commodity on earth. The more truth we have to work with, the richer we become."
Kurt Vonnegut, "Breakfast of Champions"
Other categories: Knowledge, Ignorance
36. "Some women can be fooled all of the time, and all women can be fooled some of the time, but the same woman can’t be fooled by the same man in the same way more than half of the time."
Helen Rowland, "A Guide to Men"
Other categories: Loyalty and Betrayal -:- Woman and Man
37. "Telling lies is a fault in a boy, an art in a lover, an accomplishment in a bachelor, and second-nature in a married man."
Helen Rowland, "A Guide to Men"
Other categories: Love -:- Marriage
38. "Propaganda, to be effective, must be believed. To be believed, it must be credible. To be credible, it must be true."
Hubert Humphrey
Other categories: Various -:- Trust
39. "We do not err because truth is difficult to see. It is visible at a glance. We err because this is more comfortable."
Alexander Solzhenitsyn
Other categories: Defeates and Mistakes
40. "Be true to your work, your word, and your friend."
Henry David Thoreau
Other categories: Friendship and Hostility -:- Work and Laziness
41. "Anger at lies lasts forever. Anger at truth can't last."
Greg Evans
Other categories: Anger
42. "It is the customary fate of new truths to begin as heresies and to end as superstitions."
Thomas Henry Huxley, "Aphorisms and Reflections"
43. "The visionary lies to himself, the liar only to others."
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
Other categories: Talent and Genius
44. "Repetition does not transform a lie into a truth."
Franklin D. Roosevelt
45. "If you do not tell the truth about yourself you cannot tell it about other people."
Virginia Woolf
46. "I don't want any yes-men around me. I want everybody to tell me the truth even if it costs them their jobs."
Samuel Goldwyn
Other categories: Bravery and Fear
47. "Probability is truth in some degree."
Errol E. Harris, "Hypothesis and Perception"
Other categories: Science and Technology
48. "Lawyers and painters can soon change white to black."
Danish proverb
Other categories: Art and Culture -:- Law and Crime
49. "Truth exists for the wise, beauty for the feeling heart."
Friedrich von Schiller
Other categories: Beauty and Ugliness
50. "There are those who so dislike the nude that they find something indecent in the naked truth."
Francis Herbert Bradley
Other categories: Manners and Ethics
2007, collected and compiled by Kazimierz Matan
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