Truth & Wisdom quotes for UPSC & State PCS

A witty saying proves nothing.

All that glisters is not gold.

Falsehood has a perennial spring.

Faith is not in power but in truth.

Truth was the only daughter of Time.

Wisdom is the daughter of experience.

Truth never damages a cause that is just.

Investigate what is, and not what pleases.

Man can embody truth but he cannot know it.

The truth can wait, for she lives a long life.

Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

Repetition does not transform a lie into a truth.

Nothing is so firmly believed as what we least know.

Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.

A truth is to be known always, to be uttered sometimes.

He who knows does not speak; he who speaks does not know.

Those who are free from common prejudices acquire others.

No Man is wise at all Times, or is without his blind Side.

Truth will sooner come out from error than from confusion.

Nothing is more damaging to a new truth than an old error.

A thing is not necessarily true because a man dies for it.

If you shut your door to all errors truth will be shut out.

It is error only, and not truth, that shrinks from inquiry.

Blind obedience to authority is the greatest enemy of truth.

I do not quote from the scriptures; I simply see what I see.

Better be wise by the misfortunes of others than by your own.

Beware lest you lose the substance by grasping at the shadow.

Mostly it is loss which teaches us about the worth of things.

The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook.

Heresies are experiments in man's unsatisfied search for truth.

It is precisely in knowing its limits that philosophy consists.

Facts are facts and will not disappear on account of your likes

To see what is in front of one's nose needs a constant struggle.

He is no wise man that will quit a certainty for an uncertainty.

Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.

I would trade all of my technology for an afternoon with Socrates.

Wisdom lies in thinking. The spear-head of thinking is rationalism,

It is not truth that makes man great, but man that makes truth great.

It takes two to speak the truth, — one to speak, and another to hear.

Sooner you come down to reality the sooner you will solve the problem.

There is no worse lie than a truth misunderstood by those who hear it.

Truth is as impossible to be soiled by any outward touch as the sunbeam.

The truth doesn't die. The desire for liberty cannot be fully suppressed.

We always question the bonafides of the man who tells us unpleasant facts.

We should be considerate to the living; to the dead we owe only the truth.

Let us not underrate the value of a fact; it will one day flower in a truth.

Whoever in discussion adduces authority uses not intellect but rather memory.

To put everything in balance is good, to put everything in harmony is better.

The least initial deviation from the truth is multiplied later a thousandfold.

Plato is my friend — Aristotle is my friend — but my greatest friend is truth.

Never underestimate the role of luck in the fate of individuals or of nations.

For such Truth as opposeth no man's profit nor pleasure is to all men welcome.

'The fool doth think he is wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool.'

No amount of propaganda can make right something that the world knows is wrong.

It is a familiar and significant saying that a problem well-put is half-solved.

For truth itself has not the privilege to be spoken at all times and in all sorts.

and where men build on false grounds, the more they build, the greater is the ruine:

There is not a truth existing which I fear or would wish unknown to the whole world.

It is better to be unhappy and know the worst, than to be happy in a fool's paradise!

He who has the truth at his heart need never fear the want of persuasion on his tongue.

Time destroys the figments of the imagination, while confirming the judgments of nature.

The truth comes as conqueror only because we have lost the art of receiving it as guest.

Time's glory is to calm contending kings, To unmask falsehood, and bring truth to light.

All men know the utility of useful things; but they do not know the utility of futility.

Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.

Truth is ever to be found in simplicity, and not in the multiplicity and confusion of things.

One does not decide the truth of a thought according to whether it is right-wing or left-wing.

The forceps of our minds are clumsy forceps, and crush the truth a little in taking hold of it.

A man may die, nations may rise and fall, but an idea lives on. Ideas have endurance without death.

What of a truth that is bounded by these mountains and is falsehood to the world that lives beyond?

To understand the actual world as it is, not as we should wish it to be, is the beginning of wisdom.

The inclination to seek the truth is safer than the presumption which regards unknown things as known.

Superstition is marked not by its pretension to a body of knowledge but by its method of seeking truth.

Truth does not pay homage to any society, ancient or modern. Society has to pay homage to Truth or die.

Lead us from the unreal to the real. Lead us from darkness to light. Lead us from death to immortality.

Nothing that was worthy in the past departs; no truth or goodness realized by man ever dies, or can die.

It is always better to have no ideas than false ones; to believe nothing, than to believe what is wrong.

Of course, when you are winning a war almost everything that happens can be claimed to be right and wise.

I suppose it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail.

Truth, like light, blinds. Falsehood, on the contrary, is a beautiful twilight that enhances every object.

Loyalty to petrified opinions never yet broke a chain or freed a human soul in this world — and never will.

In order that all men may be taught to speak truth, it is necessary that all likewise should learn to hear it.

Great wisdom is generous; petty wisdom is contentious. Great speech is impassioned, small speech cantankerous.

It is more from carelessness about truth than from intentional lying, that there is so much falsehood in the world.

In order to seek truth, it is necessary once in the course of our life, to doubt, as far as possible, of all things.

To convince someone of the truth, it is not enough to state it, but rather one must find the path from error to truth.

Have patience awhile; slanders are not long-lived. Truth is the child of time; erelong she shall appear to vindicate thee.

For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring.

We are not afraid to follow truth wherever it may lead, nor to tolerate any error so long as reason is left free to combat it.

To love truth for truth's sake is the principal part of human perfection in this world, and the seed-plot of all other virtues.

The fundamental cause of the trouble is that in the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt.

The disease having been caused by allowing cleverness to displace wisdom, no amount of clever research is likely to produce a cure.

Unless we... construct institutions that invest in truth, we'll be flooded by fiction.., illusion.., delusion and junk information.

Man is a credulous animal, and must believe something; in the absence of good grounds for belief, he will be satisfied with bad ones.

Lessing, the most honest of theoretical men, dared to say that he took greater delight in the quest for truth than in the truth itself.

It is unwise to be too sure of one's own wisdom. It is healthy to be reminded that the strongest might weaken and the wisest might err.

Where there is a lull of truth, an institution springs up. But the truth blows right on over it, nevertheless, and at length blows it down.

All truth is eternal. Truth is nobody’s property; no race, no individual can lay any exclusive claim to it. Truth is the nature of all souls.

There's a whole bunch of things I don't know a thing about — I just stay away from those. So, I stay within what I call my circle of competence.

Here the ways of men part: if you wish to strive for peace of soul and pleasure, then believe; if you wish to be a devotee of truth, then inquire.

The well-meaning contention that all ideas have equal merit seems to me little different from the disastrous contention that no ideas have any merit.

Truth is a shining goddess, always veiled, always distant, never wholly approachable, but worthy of all the devotion of which the human spirit is capable.

Mistaken ideas always end in bloodshed, but in every case it is someone else's blood. That is why some of our thinkers feel free to say just about anything.

All true opinions are living, and show their life by being capable of nourishment; therefore of change. But their change is that of a tree — not of a cloud.

No man of sense can put himself and his soul under the control of names... You must consider courageously and thoroughly and not accept anything carelessly.

In debate, one randomly was assigned to one side or the other. This had at least one virtue — it made one see that there was more than one side to these complex issues.

Whenever a theory appears to you as the only possible one, take this as a sign that you have neither understood the theory nor the problem which it was intended to solve.

Man has three ways of acting wisely. First, on meditation; that is the noblest. Secondly, on imitation; that is the easiest. Thirdly, on experience; that is the bitterest.

Great men are they who see that spiritual is stronger than any material force, that thoughts rule the world. No hope so bright but is the beginning of its own fulfillment.

A thought is an arrow shot at the truth; it can hit a point, but not cover the whole target. But the archer is too well satisfied with his success to ask anything farther.

Man has much power of discourse which for the most part is vain and false; animals have but little, but it is useful and true, and a small truth is better than a great lie.

The most important secular commitment is to the truth, which is based on observation and evidence rather than on mere faith. Seculars strive not to confuse truth with belief.

Those who forget good and evil and seek only to know the facts are more likely to achieve good than those who view the world through the distorting medium of their own desires.

Truth at last cannot be hidden. Dissimulation is of no avail. Dissimulation is to no purpose before so great a judge. Falsehood puts on a mask. Nothing is hidden under the sun.

All exact science is dominated by the idea of approximation. When a man tells you that he knows the exact truth about anything, you are safe in inferring that he is an inexact man.

An error does not become truth by reason of multiplied propagation, nor does truth become error because nobody sees it. Truth stands, even if there be no public support. It is self sustained.

Our credulity is a part of the imperfection of our natures. It is inherent in us to desire to generalize, when we ought, on the contrary, to guard ourselves very carefully from this tendency.

For it was my master who taught me not only how very little I knew but also that any wisdom to which I might ever aspire could consist only in realizing more fully the infinity of my ignorance.

I believe that a scientist looking at nonscientific problems is just as dumb as the next guy — and when he talks about a nonscientific matter, he will sound as naive as anyone untrained in the matter.

The eye of outward sense is as the palm of a hand, The whole of the object is not grasped in the palm. The sea itself is one thing, the foam another; Neglect the foam, and regard the sea with your eyes.

Rarely do we arrive at the summit of truth without running into extremes; we have frequently to exhaust the part of error, and even of folly, before we work our way up to the noble goal of tranquil wisdom.

New truth is often uncomfortable, especially to the holders of power; nevertheless, amid the long record of cruelty and bigotry, it is the most important achievement of our intelligent but wayward species. '

The silent colossal National Lie that is the support and confederate of all the tyrannies and shams and inequalities and unfairnesses that afflict the peoples — that is the one to throw bricks and sermons at.

It might be plausibly maintained, that in almost every one of the leading controversies, past or present, in social philosophy, both sides were in the right in what they affirmed, though wrong in what they denied.

The discovery of truth is prevented more effectively, not by the false appearance things present and which mislead into error, not directly by weakness of the reasoning powers, but by preconceived opinion, by prejudice.

The deepest thinking is humble. It is only concerned that the flame of truth which it keeps alive should burn with the strongest and purest heat; it does not trouble about the distance to which its brightness penetrates.

In our reasonings concerning matter of fact, there are all imaginable degrees of assurance, from the highest certainty to the lowest species of moral evidence. A wise man, therefore, proportions his belief to the evidence.

If there are certain pages of Mr Bertrand Russell's book, Power, which seem rather empty, that is merely to say that we have now sunk to a depth at which the restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men.

Where men are the most sure and arrogant, they are commonly the most mistaken, and have there given reins to passion, without that proper deliberation and suspense, which can alone secure them from the grossest absurdities.

False and doubtful positions, relied upon as unquestionable maxims, keep those who build on them in the dark from truth. Such are usually the prejudices imbibed from education, party, reverence, fashion, interest, et cetera.

Who may be called a paramahamsa? He who, like a swan, can take the milk from a mixture of milk and water, leaving aside the water. He who, like an ant, can take the sugar from a mixture of sugar and sand, leaving aside the sand.

Faith which refuses to face indisputable facts is but little faith. Truth is always gain, however hard it is to accommodate ourselves to it. To linger in any kind of untruth proves to be a departure from the straight way of faith.

I did not know that mankind were suffering for want of gold. I have seen a little of it. I know that it is very malleable, but not so malleable as wit. A grain of gold will gild a great surface, but not so much as a grain of wisdom.

The guidelines for achieving wisdom consist of three leading maxims: 1) Think for yourself; 2) (in communication with other people) Put yourself in the place of the other person; 3) Always think by remaining faithful to your own self.

There always comes a time in history when the person who dares to say that 2+2=4 is punished by death. And the issue is not what reward or what punishment will be the outcome of that reasoning. The issue is simply whether or not 2+2=4.

If any man can convince me and bring home to me that I do not think or act aright, gladly will I change; for I search after truth, by which man never yet was harmed. But he is harmed who abideth on still in his deception and ignorance.

Wisdom is not communicable. The wisdom which a wise man tries to communicate always sounds foolish... Knowledge can be communicated, but not wisdom. One can find it, live it, do wonders through it, but one cannot communicate and teach it.

A critique is not a matter of saying that things are not right as they are. It is a matter of pointing out on what kinds of assumptions, what kinds of familiar, unchallenged, unconsidered modes of thought the practices that we accept rest.

Reality is, after all, too big for our frail understanding to fully comprehend. Nevertheless, we have to build our life on the theory which contains the maximum truth. We cannot sit still because we cannot, or do not , know the Absolute Truth.

All students of man and society who possess that first requisite for so difficult a study, a due sense of its difficulties, are aware that the besetting danger is not so much of embracing falsehood for true, as of mistaking part of the truth for the whole.

I do see one large and grievous kind of ignorance, separate from the rest, and as weighty as all the other parts put together. Thinking that one knows a thing when one does not know it. Through this, I believe, all the mistakes of the mind are caused in all of us.

I wish to propose for the reader's favourable consideration a doctrine which may, I fear, appear wildly paradoxical and subversive. The doctrine in question is this: that it is undesirable to believe a proposition when there is no ground whatever for supposing it true.

The greatest thing a human soul ever does in this world is to see something, and tell what it saw in a plain way. Hundreds of people can talk for one who can think, but thousands can think for one who can see. To see clearly is poetry, prophecy, and religion, — all in one.

For the trouble with lying and deceiving is that their efficiency depends entirely upon a clear notion of the truth that the liar and deceiver wishes to hide. In this sense, truth, even if it does not prevail in public, possesses an ineradicable primacy over all falsehoods.

Whenever you see a sweeping statement that a tremendous amount can come from a very small number of assumptions, you always find that it is false. There are usually a large number of implied assumptions that are far from obvious if you think about them sufficiently carefully.

The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.

The voice of the intellect is a soft one, but it does not rest until it has gained a hearing. Ultimately, after endlessly repeated rebuffs, it succeeds. This is one of the few points in which it may be optimistic about the future of mankind, but in itself it signifies not a little.

Love truth, but pardon error.

Time is the only critic without ambition.

If a problem cannot be solved, enlarge it.

You should inform your gut and then trust it.

Wait for that wisest of all counselors, Time.

With insufficient data it is easy to go wrong.

You have to study a great deal to know a little.

There is always a philosophy for lack of courage.

Only the most uncritical minds are free from doubt.

We read the world wrong and say that it deceives us.

One always speaks badly when one has nothing to say.

One that confounds good and evil is an enemy to the good.

The greatest deception men suffer is from their own opinions.

Uncompromising thought is the luxury of the closeted recluse.

There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.

Desire, ignorance, and inequality—this is the trinity of bondage.

My thinking is first and last and always for the sake of my doing.

There is a wisdom of the Head, and … there is a wisdom of the Heart.

They defend their errors as if they were defending their inheritance.

You really only know when you know little. Doubt grows with knowledge.

Superstition sets the whole world in flames; philosophy quenches them.

It is dangerous to be right in matters where established men are wrong.

A little group of wise hearts is better than a wilderness full of fools.

Wonder is the feeling of a philosopher, and philosophy begins in wonder.

Truth can be stated in a thousand different ways, yet each one can be true.

When we hear news, we should always wait for the sacrament of confirmation.

What then is, generally speaking, the truth of history? A fable agreed upon.

As a rule we disbelieve all the facts and theories for which we have no use.

False words are not only evil in themselves, but they infect the soul with evil.

We must never forget that art is not a form of propaganda; it is a form of truth.

Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world.

Not taking risks one doesn't understand is often the best form of risk management.

It is doubtless impossible to approach any human problems with a mind free from bias.

Most of the change we think we see in life Is due to truths being in and out of favor.

The better part of valour is discretion; in the which better part I have saved my life.

Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.

How many things served us yesterday for articles of faith, which today are fables for us?

You do ill if you praise, and still worse if you reprove in a matter you do not understand.

The fool has one great advantage over a man of sense — he is always satisfied with himself.

Anyone who holds a true opinion without understanding is like a blind man on the right road.

I am sure, zeal or love for truth can never permit falsehood to be used in the defence of it.

Generally speaking, the errors in religion are dangerous; those in philosophy only ridiculous.

Right is of no sex, Truth is of no color, God is the Father of us all, and we are all Brethren.

The work of science is to substitute facts for appearances, and demonstrations for impressions.

Speech is human, silence is divine, yet also brutish and dead: therefore we must learn both arts.

I do not want the peace that passeth understanding. I want the understanding which bringeth peace.

We become more religious in proportion to our readiness to doubt and not our willingness to believe.

It is the duty of every man, so far as his ability extends, to detect and expose delusion and error.

In any case, we do not advance the human cause by refusing to consider ideas that make us frightened.

Men reject their prophets and slay them, but they love their martyrs and honor those they have slain.

It is one thing to show a man that he is in error, and another to put him in possession of the truth.

I like friends who have independent minds because they tend to make you see problems from all angles.

The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways. The point, however, is to change it.

A free man thinks of death least of all things; and his wisdom is a meditation not of death but of life.

The attempt to combine wisdom and power has only rarely been successful, and then only for a short while.

All intelligent thoughts have already been thought; what is necessary is only to try to think them again.

No student knows his subject: the most he knows is where and how to find out the things he does not know.

Reason well from the beginning and then there will never be any need to look back with confusion and doubt.

Hinduism is not a sect but a fellowship of all who accept the law of right and earnestly seek for the truth.

Do not wonder, if the common people speak more truly than those of high rank; for they speak with more safety.

What then is time? If no one asks me, I know what it is. If I wish to explain it to him who asks, I do not know.

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.

Theoretical approaches have their place and are, I suppose, essential but a theory must be tempered with reality.

As you listen to the present controversy about pesticides, I recommend that you ask yourself-Who speaks? And Why?

To change your mind and to follow him who sets you right is to be nonetheless the free agent that you were before.

Fiction is Truth's elder sister. Obviously. No one in the world knew what truth was till some one had told a story.

To save the world requires faith and courage: faith in reason, and courage to proclaim what reason shows to be true.

The degree of one's emotion varies inversely with one's knowledge of the facts – the less you know the hotter you get.

So little pains do the vulgar take in the investigation of truth, accepting readily the first story that comes to hand.

People almost invariably arrive at their beliefs not on the basis of proof but on the basis of what they find attractive.

All the greatest things are simple, and many can be expressed in a single word: Freedom; Justice; Honour; Duty; Mercy; Hope.

To believe blindly is to degenerate the human soul. Be an atheist if you want, but do not believe in anything unquestioningly.

Thus I have explained to you the most confidential of all knowledge. Deliberate on this fully, and then do what you wish to do.

They say we offer simple answers to complex problems. Well, perhaps there is a simple answer — not an easy answer — but simple.

The use of traveling is to regulate imagination by reality, and instead of thinking how things may be, to see them as they are.

Read not to contradict and confute, nor to believe and take for granted, nor to find talk and discourse, but to weigh and consider.

The wise man should restrain his senses like the crane and accomplish his purpose with due knowledge of his place, time and ability.

It is the patient building of character, the intense struggle to realize the truth, which alone will tell in the future of humanity.

Experience never errs; it is only your judgments that err by promising themselves effects such as are not caused by your experiments.

A reliable way to make people believe in falsehoods is frequent repetition, because familiarity is not easily distinguished from truth.

Yesterday we obeyed kings and bent our necks before emperors. But today we kneel only to truth, follow only beauty, and obey only love.

Our comforting conviction that the world makes sense rests on a secure foundation: our almost unlimited ability to ignore our ignorance.

The shaft of the arrow had been feathered with one of the eagle's own plumes. We often give our enemies the means of our own destruction.

A fool associating himself with a wise man all his life sees not the truth, even as the spoon enjoys not the taste of the soup. (Verse 64)

Everyone believes in the atrocities of the enemy and disbelieves in those of his own side, without ever bothering to examine the evidence.

Of all evils of war the greatest is the purely spiritual evil: the hatred, the injustice, the repudiation of truth, the artificial conflict.

It is only by prudence, wisdom, and dexterity, that great ends are attained and obstacles overcome. Without these qualities nothing succeeds.

You could attach prices to thoughts. Some cost a lot, some a little. And how does one pay for thoughts? The answer, I think, is: with courage.

Modern science has been a voyage into the unknown, with a lesson in humility waiting at every stop. Many passengers would rather have stayed home.

One is ashamed to say how little is needed for all men to be delivered from those calamities which now oppress them; it is only needful not to lie.

All the great utterances of man have to be judged not by the letter but by the spirit — the spirit which unfolds itself with the growth of life in history.

Among the calamities of war may be justly numbered the diminution of the love of truth, by the falsehoods which interest dictates and credulity encourages.

It is perfectly true, as the philosophers say, that life must be understood backwards. But they forget the other proposition, that it must be lived forwards.

We cling to our own point of view, as though everything depended on it. Yet our opinions have no permanence; like autumn and winter, they gradually pass away.

Do not go outside yourself, return to yourself: truth dwells in the interiority of man and, if you find that your nature is changeable, transcend yourself too.

One thing I have learned in a long life: that all our science, measured against reality, is primitive and childlike—and yet it is the most precious thing we have.

The whole of science... is a self-correcting mechanism. ...[S]cientific journals publish ...corrections to previous publications.., to past mistakes or past lacuna.

There are times when we must sink to the bottom of our misery to understand truth, just as we must descend to the bottom of a well to see the stars in broad daylight.

A little Learning is a dang'rous Thing; Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian Spring: There shallow Draughts intoxicate the Brain, And drinking largely sobers us again.

The picture of the world that's presented to the public has only the remotest relation to reality. The truth of the matter is buried under edifice after edifice of lies upon lies.

Indeed, wisdom is born of meditation; without meditation wisdom is lost. Knowing this twofold path of gain and loss of wisdom, one should conduct oneself so that wisdom may increase.

For us, with the rule of right and wrong given us by Christ, there is nothing for which we have no standard. And there is no greatness where there is not simplicity, goodness, and truth.

A few months ago I told the American people I did not trade arms for hostages. My heart and my best intentions still tell me that's true, but the facts and the evidence tell me it is not.

There are many people who reach their conclusions about life like schoolboys; they cheat their master by copying the answer out of a book without having worked out the sum for themselves.

No lie you can speak or act but it will come, after longer or shorter circulation, like a Bill drawn on Nature's Reality, and be presented there for payment, — with the answer, No effects.

Books, like conversation, rarely give us any precise ideas: nothing is so common as to read and converse unprofitably. We must here repeat what Locke has so strongly urged—Define your terms.

We all have a tendency to think that the world must conform to our prejudices. The opposite view involves some effort of thought, and most people would die sooner than think – in fact they do so.

History is truly the witness of times past, the light of truth, the life of memory, the teacher of life, the messenger of antiquity; whose voice, but the orator's, can entrust her to immortality?

To lie is so vile, that even if it were in speaking well of godly things it would take off something from God's grace; and Truth is so excellent, that if it praises but small things they become noble.

Truth gains more even by the errors of one who, with due study and preparation, thinks for himself, than by the true opinions of those who only hold them because they do not suffer themselves to think.

The search for patterns without critical analysis, and rigid skepticism without a search for patterns, are the antipodes of incomplete science. The effective pursuit of knowledge requires both functions.

Now we are dealing with potentially superintelligent agents. Nobody has any experience with building a hybrid human AI society. We should be a lot more humble... We think we know how to build it! No we don't!

Ah! when will the yoke of Custom—Custom, the blind tyrant, of which all other tyrants make their slave—ah! when will that misery-perpetuating yoke be shaken off?—when, when will Reason be seated on her throne?

It is a mistake, too, to say that the face is the mirror of the soul. The truth is, men are very hard to know, and yet, not to be deceived, we must judge them by their present actions, but for the present only.

Men of learning are those who have read the contents of books. Thinkers, geniuses, and those who have enlightened the world and furthered the race of men, are those who have made direct use of the book of the world.

Before mass leaders seize the power to fit reality to their lies, their propaganda is marked by its extreme contempt for facts as such, for in their opinion fact depends entirely on the power of man who can fabricate it.

We speak not strictly and philosophically when we talk of the combat of passion and of reason. Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.

Whether the succeeding generation is to be more virtuous than their predecessors, I cannot say; but I am sure they will have more worldly wisdom, and enough, I hope, to know that honesty is the first chapter in the book of wisdom.

At least two thirds of our miseries spring from human stupidity, human malice, and those great motivators and justifiers of malice and stupidity, idealism, dogmatism and proselytizing zeal on behalf of religious or political idols.

Then what should we work for? Only this: proper understanding; unselfish action; truthful speech. A resolve to accept whatever happens as necessary and familiar, flowing like water from that same source and spring. (Hays translation)

Human nature is not simple and any classification that roughly divides men into good and bad, superior and inferior, slave and free, is and must be ludicrously untrue and universally dangerous as a permanent exhaustive classification.

I have known a vast quantity of nonsense talked about bad men not looking you in the face. Don't trust that conventional idea. Dishonesty will stare honesty out of countenance, any day in the week, if there is anything to be got by it.

The scientists from Franklin to Morse were clear thinkers and did not produce erroneous theories. The scientists of today think deeply instead of clearly. One must be sane to think clearly, but one can think deeply and be quite insane.

The treatment of the period of Reconstruction reflects small credit upon American historians as scientists. We have too often a deliberate attempt so to change the facts of history that the story will make pleasant reading for Americans.

So far as I can see, all political thinking for years past has been vitiated in the same way. People can foresee the future only when it coincides with their own wishes, and the most grossly obvious facts can be ignored when they are unwelcome.

What counts is not what sounds plausible, not what we would like to believe, not what one or two witnesses claim, but only what is supported by hard evidence rigorously and skeptically examined. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

The Assembly has witnessed over the last weeks how historical truth is established; once an allegation has been repeated a few times, it is no longer an allegation, it is an established fact, even if no evidence has been brought out in order to support it.

Circumstances (which with some gentlemen pass for nothing) give in reality to every political principle its distinguishing colour, and discriminating effect. The circumstances are what render every civil and political scheme beneficial or noxious to mankind.

Philosophy, if it cannot answer so many questions as we could wish, has at least the power of asking questions which increase the interest of the world, and show the strangeness and wonder lying just below the surface even in the commonest things of daily life.

Rhetoric, it seems, is a producer of persuasion for belief, not for instruction in the matter of right and wrong … And so the rhetorician's business is not to instruct a law court or a public meeting in matters of right and wrong, but only to make them believe.

We should not pretend to understand the world only by the intellect; we apprehend it just as much by feeling. Therefore, the judgment of the intellect is, at best, only the half of truth, and must, if it be honest, also come to an understanding of its inadequacy.

For such is the nature of men, that howsoever they may acknowledge many others to be more witty, or more eloquent, or more learned; Yet they will hardly believe there be many so wise as themselves: For they see their own wit at hand, and other men's at a distance.

An army of principles will penetrate where an army of soldiers cannot; it will succeed where diplomatic management would fall: it is neither the Rhine, the Channel, nor the ocean that can arrest its progress: it will march on the horizon of the world, and it will conquer.

Our aim as scientists is objective truth; more truth, more interesting truth, more intelligible truth. We cannot reasonably aim at certainty. Once we realize that human knowledge is fallible, we realize also that we can never be completely certain that we have not made a mistake.

In the welter of conflicting fanaticisms, one of the few unifying forces is scientific truthfulness, by which I mean the habit of basing our beliefs upon observations and inferences as impersonal, and as much divested of local and temperamental bias, as is possible for human beings.

Probably some ninety-nine out of every hundred of our gifted souls, who have to seek a career for themselves, go this beaver road. Whereby the first half-result, national wealth namely, is plentifully realized; and only the second half, or wisdom to guide it, is dreadfully behindhand.

As to Macarthur, I don't feel in a position to have clear opinions about anyone I know only from newspapers. You see, whenever they deal with anyone (or anything) I know myself, I find they're always a mass of lies & misunderstandings: so I conclude they're no better in the places where I don't know.

The best teachers still taught in a Socratic style, asking questions, responding to the answers with still another question. And in all of our courses, we were taught that what mattered most was asking the right question — having posed the question well, answering the question was often a relatively easy matter.

The shifty language of politics,... that strange language full of Maya and falsities of self-illusion and deliberate delusion of others, which almost immediately turns all true and vivid phrases into a jargon, so that men may fight in a cloud of words without any clear sense of the thing they are battling for....