Sunday, October 10, 2021 – Truth or Consequences
Reading made Don Quixote a gentleman. Believing what he read made him mad. ~ George Bernard Shaw
Most of our so-called reasoning consists in finding arguments for going on believing as we already do. ~ James Harvey Robinson
We are here and it is now. Further than that all human knowledge is moonshine. ~ H. L. Mencken
Generally the theories we believe we call facts, and the facts we disbelieve we call theories. ~ Felix Cohen
Few really believe. The most only believe that they believe or even make believe. ~ John Lancaster Spalding
Man tends to treat all his opinions as principles. ~ Herbert Agar
Man is a credulous animal, and must believe something; in the absence of good grounds for belief, he will be satisfied with bad ones. ~ Bertrand Russell
It is necessary to the happiness of man that he be mentally faithful to himself. Infidelity does not consist in believing or in disbelieving; it consists in professing to believe what he does not believe. ~ Thomas Paine
Disbelief in magic can force a poor soul into believing in government and business. ~ Tom Robbins
One of the peculiar sins of the twentieth century which we’ve developed to a very high level is the sin of credulity. It has been said that when human beings stop believing in God they believe in nothing. The truth is much worse: they believe in anything. ~ Malcolm Muggeridge
It has always been the prerogative of children and half-wits to point out that the emperor has no clothes. But the half-wit remains a half-wit, and the emperor remains an emperor. ~ Neil Gaiman
Truth is beautiful, without doubt; but so are lies. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson
A liar begins with making falsehood appear like truth, and ends with making truth itself appear like falsehood. ~ William Shenstone
The truth is incontrovertible, malice may attack it, ignorance may deride it, but in the end, there it is. ~ Winston Churchill
Whoever is careless with the truth in small matters cannot be trusted with important matters. ~ Albert Einstein
Truth is like the sun. You can shut it out for a time, but it ain’t goin’ away. ~ Elvis Presley
Perhaps the truth depends on a walk around the lake. ~ Wallace Stevens
Truth disappears with the telling of it. ~ Lawrence Durrell
There are some people so addicted to exaggeration that they can’t tell the truth without lying. ~ Josh Billings
The truth is rarely pure and never simple. ~ Oscar Wilde
Like all dreamers I confuse disenchantment with truth. ~ Jean-Paul Sartre
There are many more wrong answers than right ones, and they are easier to find. ~ Michael Friedlander
I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth. ~ Umberto Eco
Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing ever happened. ~ Winston Churchill
It is hard to believe that a man is telling the truth when you know that you would lie if you were in his place. ~ H. L. Mencken
Reality is bad enough. Why should I tell the truth? ~ Patrick Sky
It is always the best policy to tell the truth, unless, of course, you are an exceptionally good liar. ~ Jerome K. Jerome
You always admire what you really don’t understand. ~ Blaise Pascal
To kill an error is as good a service as, and sometimes even better than, the establishing of a new truth or fact. ~ Charles Darwin
Truth has very few friends and those few are suicides. ~ Antonio Porchia
The truth is more important than the facts. ~ Frank Lloyd Wright
The opposite of a correct statement is a false statement. But the opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth. ~ Niels Bohr
There’s one way to find out if a man is honest. Ask him. If he says, “Yes,” you know he is a crook. ~ Groucho Marx
Every man has a right to utter what he thinks truth, and every other man has a right to knock him down for it. ~ Samuel Johnson
Men are able to trust one another, knowing the exact degree of dishonesty they are entitled to expect. ~ Stephen Butler Leacock
It’s discouraging to think how many people are shocked by honesty and how few by deceit. ~ Noel Coward
Reason is the test of ridicule, not ridicule the test of truth. ~ William Warburton
A great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep. ~ Saul Bellow
On the throne of the world, any delusion can become fact. ~ Gore Vidal, Julian
Actually we are a vulgar, pushing mob whose passions are easily mobilized by demagogues, newspaper men, religious quacks, agitators and such like. To call this a society of free peoples is blasphemous. What have we to offer the world besides the superabundant loot which we recklessly plunder from the earth under the maniacal delusion that this insane activity represents progress and enlightenment? ~ Henry Miller
A nation is a society united by a delusion about its ancestry and by common hatred of its neighbors. ~ William Ralph Inge
Few people have the imagination for reality. ~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
It is a far, far better thing to have a firm anchor in nonsense than to put out on the troubled seas of thought. ~ John Kenneth Galbraith
The formula “two and two make five” is not without its attractions. ~ Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from the Underground, 1864
Man seeks to escape himself in myth, and does so by any means at his disposal – drugs, alcohol, or lies. Unable to withdraw into himself, he disguises himself. Lies and inaccuracy give him a few moments of comfort. ~ Jean Cocteau
We are stubborn, self-destructive conformists. Any other view of our species is just a self-congratulatory delusion. ~ Michael Crichton
All are lunatics, but he who can analyze his delusion is called a philosopher. ~ Ambrose Bierce
Take things as they are. Punch when you have to punch. Kick when you have to kick. ~ Bruce Lee
I believe in looking reality straight in the eye and denying it. ~ Garrison Keillor
There are two ways to slide easily through life: to believe everything or to doubt everything; both ways save us from thinking. ~ Alfred Korzybski
It is not bigotry to be certain we are right; but it is bigotry to be unable to imagine how we might possibly have gone wrong. ~ G. K. Chesterton
Ignorance is preferable to error, and he is less remote from the truth who believes nothing than he who believes what is wrong. ~ Thomas Jefferson
I would never die for my beliefs because I might be wrong. ~ Bertrand Russell
The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one. ~ George Bernard Shaw
In the province of the mind, what one believes to be true either is true or becomes true. ~ John Lilly
Sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast. ~ Lewis Carroll
They were so strong in their beliefs that there came a time when it hardly mattered what exactly those beliefs were; they all fused into a single stubbornness. ~ Louise Erdrich
There’s nothing that can help you understand your beliefs more than trying to explain them to an inquisitive child. ~ Frank A. Clark
Faith: Belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks without knowledge, of things without parallel. ~ Ambrose Bierce
The dust of exploded beliefs may make a fine sunset. ~ Geoffrey Madan
The eloquent man is he who is no beautiful speaker, but who is inwardly and desperately drunk with a certain belief. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson
Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, which is the only fact we have. ~ James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time
It is a common delusion that you make things better by talking about them. ~ Rose Macaulay
Just Above Sunset 