Telling Truth

[Posted by reader_iam]

As I was zipping by the TV just a few minutes ago, a rejoinder by a defense attorney on a rerun of "Law & Order" caught my ear:

The funny thing about the truth is that everyone has their own version.

Wow. Doesn't that have an unmistakable ring of, well, truth just about now?

I haven't done any quote posts lately, so what the heck? I'll take that overheard snippet as a sign to offer a few gems:

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

A lie which is half a truth is ever the blackest of lies.--Alfred Lord Tennyson

There are truths on this side of the Pyranees, which are falsehoods on the other.--Blaise Pascal

All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.--Arthur Schopenhauer

Truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it.--Flanner O'Connor

No amount of experimentation can ever prove me right; a single experiment can prove me wrong.--Albert Einstein

False history gets made all day, any day; the truth of the new is never on the news.--Adrienne Rich

I never give them hell. I just tell the truth and they think it's hell.--Harry S. Truman

“The truth is rarely pure and never simple.--Oscar Wilde

How many legs does a dog have if you call the tail a leg? Four; calling a tail a leg doesn't make it a leg.--Abraham Lincoln

A truth that's told with bad intent beats all the lies you can invent.--William Blake

As there is no worse lie than a truth misunderstood by those who hear it, so reasonable arguments, challenges to magnanimity, and appeals to sympathy or justice, are folly when we are dealing with human crocodiles and boa-constrictors.--William James

The truth of a proposition has nothing to do with its credibility. And vice versa.--Robert A. Heinlein.

The first reaction to truth is hatred.--Tertullian

One of the most untruthful things possible, you know,
is a collection of facts, because they can be made to
appear so many different ways.--Karl Menninger

Breach of promise is a base surrender of truth.--Mohandas Gandhi

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