It is the writer's duty to tell the terrible truth, and it is a reader's civic duty to learn this truth. To turn away, to close one's eyes and walk past is to insult the memory of those who have perished.
Never tell an unnecessary lie; the truth has great authority. The cleverest murders have been caught, not because they told the one essential lie, but because they continued to lie about unimportant detail when the truth could have done them no harm.
Can't you see? Before you knew the truth, we were happy. What's the god in ferreting out the truth all that time? It's always unpleasant." "Is it only lies that are Pleasant?" "Usually. That's why people tell them. To make life bearable.
A piece of art, when completed, encapsulates its own reality. As its architect, the artist’s task is to craft it well enough that the reader believes in its existence and is willing to enter, explore, and engage based on the artist’s version of t...
Every moment of existence is a volcano full of truth! Every single moment is ready to explode, may be now, may be two minutes or may be two years later! Truths are ready to erupt! Every single moment is ready to erupt! Be silent; wait for the eruptio...
I do not understand those who take little or no interest in the subject of religion. If religion embodies a truth, it is certainly the most important truth of human existence. If it is largely error, then it is one of monumentally tragic proportions�...
NPR fired me for telling the truth. The truth is that I worry when I am getting on an airplane and see people dressed in garb that identifies them first and foremost as Muslims. This is not a bigoted statement. It is a statement of my feelings, my fe...
Yesterday NPR fired me for telling the truth. The truth is that I worry when I am getting on an airplane and see people dressed in garb that identifies them first and foremost as Muslims. This is not a bigoted statement. It is a statement of my feeli...
I've still not written as well as I want to. I want to write so that the reader in Des Moines, Iowa, in Kowloon, China, in Cape Town, South Africa, can say, 'You know, that's the truth. I wasn't there, and I wasn't a six-foot black girl, but that's t...
You don't need a digital David Petraeus or a President Bush avatar to distract you from the truth. You don't need to wait decades to have disinformation beamed into your head. You just need a constant stream of misleading information, half truths, an...
I suppose history always did have in it a large bit of the perspective of those who wrote it. People tend to make their own truth of what was right loom larger than other truths just as true but somehow less favorable to telling.
I assume the closest members of my family don't actually want to kill me, but the truth is that I have shamed and hurt them; they have to deal with the outrage that my public statements cause, and undoubtedly some members of my clan do want to kill m...
A thing may fail as a poem because it tries to do what a poem cannot do: it tries to become a treatise on cosmic truth... We can best be exact about the cosmic things - God and truth, beauty, eternity and love - by not talking directly about them.
If we bring not the good courage of minds covetous of truth, and truth only, prepared to hear all things, and decide upon all things, according to evidence, we should do more wisely to sit down contented in ignorance, than to bestir ourselves only to...
I think life is difficult and that's that. I am not at all - absolutely not at all - interested in the pursuit of happiness. I am not interested in the pursuit of positivity. I am interested in pursuing a truth, and the truth often seems to be not ha...
I needed to step away from music because the truth was I couldn't be the dad I wanted to be to my kids. My truth was that I could not reconcile the two worlds - the entertainment world and being the dad I wanted to be in the present. You can't substi...
Pleasure without God, without the sacred boundaries, will actually leave you emptier than before. And this is biblical truth, this is experiential truth. The loneliest people in the world are amongst the wealthiest and most famous who found no bounda...
The real truths of life are never entirely new to you or to anybody because there is a level deep down within you where you already know all the things, all those spiritual truths that you read or hear, and then recognize them. I say 'recognize' beca...
You don’t have to feed the lie if you don’t want it to. If you make it credible it will become that, but only in your mind and only as disproportionate as you’ve decided it is. Truth has a way of being more persistent and if the two ever meet, ...
Atheism and agnosticism signify the rejection of certain images and concepts of God or of truth, which are historically conditioned and therefore inadequate. Atheism is a challenge to religion to purifiy its images and concepts and come nearer to the...
Without free speech no search for truth is possible... no discovery of truth is useful... Better a thousandfold abuse of free speech than denial of free speech. The abuse dies in a day, but the denial slays the life of the people, and entombs the hop...
