The truth that makes men free is for the most part the truth which men prefer not to hear.
- Herbert Sebastien Agar

To be ignorant of one's ignorance is the malady of the ignorant.
- Amos Bronson Alcott

People who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction, and anyone who insists on remaining in a state of innocence long after that innocence is dead turns himself into a monster.
- James Baldwin (1924-1987), Fiction Writer, Essayist, Social Critic

When faced with a choice between confronting an unpleasant reality and defending a set of comforting and socially accepted beliefs, most people choose the later course.
- W. Lance Bennett

As scarce as truth is, the supply has always been in excess of the demand.
- Josh Billings

The trouble with most folks isn't so much their ignorance, as knowing so many things that ain't so.
- Josh Billings [Henry Wheeler Shaw] (1818-1885), American humorist and lecturer

The greatest obstacle to discovery is not ignorance -- it is the illusion of knowledge.
- Daniel J Boorstin

Ah yes, truth. Funny how everyone is always asking for it but when they get it they don't believe it because it's not the truth they want to hear.
- Helena Cassadine

Some explanations of a crime are not explanations: they're part of the crime.
- Olavo de Cavarlho

Laws just or unjust may govern men's actions. Tyrannies may restrain or regulate their words. The machinery of propaganda may pack their minds with falsehood and deny them truth for many generations of time. But the soul of man thus held in trance or frozen in a long night can be awakened by a spark coming from God knows where and in a moment the whole structure of lies and oppression is on trial for its life.
- Sir Winston Churchill

Some of mankind's most terrible misdeeds have been committed under the spell of certain magic words or phrases.
- James Bryant Conant

Search for the truth is the noblest occupation of man; its publication is a duty.
- Anne Louise Germaine de Stael (1766-1817), French author

Nothing is easier than self-deceit. For what each man wishes, that he also believes to be true.
- Demosthenes

There is one safeguard known generally to the wise, which is an advantage and security to all, but especially to democracies as against despots. What is it? Distrust.
- Demosthenes [Philippic 2, sect. 24]

Knowledge makes a man unfit to be a slave.
- Frederick Douglass

The modern susceptibility to conformity and obedience to authority indicates that the truth endorsed by authority is likely to be accepted as such by a majority of the people.
- David Edwards, British columnist [Burning All Illusions, 1996]

Blessed is the man who, having nothing to stay, abstains from giving us worthy evidence of the fact.
- George Eliot

Every violation of truth is not only a sort of suicide in the liar, but is a stab at the health of human society.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

Propaganda is persuading people to make up their minds while withholding some of the facts from them.
- Harold Evans

If a million people say a foolish thing, it is still a foolish thing.
- Anatole France [Jacques Anatole Thibault] (1844-1924)

Half a truth is often a great lie.
- Benjamin Franklin

The doorstep to the temple of wisdom is a knowledge of our own ignorance.
- Benjamin Franklin

An error does not become truth by reason of multiplied propagation, nor does truth become error because nobody sees it.
- Mohandas Gandhi

Truth resides in every human heart, and one has to search for it there, and to be guided by truth as one sees it. But no one has a right to coerce others to act according to his own view of truth.
- Mahatma Mohandas K. Gandhi

The true hypocrite is the one who ceases to perceive his [or her] deception, the one who lies with sincerity.
- Andre Gide

Most people would rather opine a lie and "fit in" than profess the truth and be excluded. Just as the majority would rather be lied to and made comfortable than be told the truth and made uncomfortable. Liars have held humanity in the throes of illusion for countless centuries. Governmental, religious, and academic officialdom can and do transform basically decent human beings into unconscious automatons bereft of free will. They do this successfully because a majority of humans are terrified to assume personal responsibility.
- Michael Godspeed

Our real enemies are the people who make us feel so good that we are slowly, but inexorably, pulled down into the quicksand of smugness and self-satisfaction.
- Sydney Harris

We are apt to shut our eyes against a painful truth... For my part, I am willing to know the whole truth; to know the worst; and to provide for it.
- Patrick Henry

Through clever and constant application of propaganda, people can be made to see paradise as hell, and also the other way round, to consider the most wretched sort of life as paradise.
- Adolf Hitler, German Chancellor, leader of the Nazi party

Propaganda does not deceive people; it merely helps them to deceive themselves.
- Eric Hoffer (1902-1983)

The propagandist's purpose is to make one set of people forget that certain other sets of people are human.
- Aldous Huxley (1894-1963), author

Every great advance in natural knowledge has involved the absolute rejection of authority.
- T.H. Huxley

"Information is the currency of Democracy." "In matters of style, swim with the current, in matters of principle, stand like a rock" "If all the people knew all the facts, they would never make a mistake." "It is better for one hundred guilty men to go free than one innocent man to go to jail" "It is wrong to take a man's money and use it to promote ideas he does not agree with" "It's better to debate an issue without settling it, than to settle an issue without debate." "The end of democracy, and the defeat of the American Revolution will occur when government falls into the hands of the lending institutions and moneyed incorporations."
- Thomas Jefferson

The most effective means of preventing tyranny is to illuminate, as far as practicable, the minds of the people at large, and more especially to give them knowledge of those facts.
- Thomas Jefferson

Integrity is telling myself the truth. And honesty is telling the truth to other people.
- Spencer Johnson

Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.
- Martin Luther King, Jr.

Many people today don't want honest answers insofar as honest means unpleasant or disturbing. They want a soft answer that turneth away anxiety.
- Louis Kronenberger (1904-1980)

Today the world is the victim of propaganda because people are not intellectually competent. More than anything the United States needs effective citizens competent to do their own thinking.
- William Mather Lewis, President, George Washington University 1923-1927

A radical is one who speaks the truth.
- Charles A. Lindbergh, Sr., Congressman, father of famous aviator [June 15, 1957]

For the great majority of mankind are satisfied with appearances, as though they were realities, and are often more influenced by the things that seem than by those that are.
- Niccolo Machiavelli (1469-1527), Italian Statesman and Political Philosopher [Discourses, 1513-1517]

The dissenter is every human being at those moments of his life when he resigns momentarily from the herd and thinks for himself.
- Archibald Macleish

The advancement and diffusion of knowledge is the only guardian of true liberty.
- James Madison (1751-1836), Father of US Constitution, 4th US President

A popular Government, without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a Prologue to a Farce or a Tragedy; or, perhaps both. Knowledge will forever govern ignorance: And a people who mean to be their own Governors, must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives.
- James Madison [letter to W.T. Barry 4 August 1822]

To be persuasive we must be believable; to be believable we must be credible; credible we must be truthful.
- Edward R. Murrow

We have now sunk to a depth at which the restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men.
- George Orwell

Political language... is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.
- George Orwell

The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns, as it were, instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink.
- George Orwell, English novelist, essayist, and critic (1903-1950)

In times of universal deceit, telling the truth will be a revolutionary act.
- George Orwell

No man is prejudiced in favor of a thing, knowing it to be wrong. He is attached to it on the belief of its being right; and when he sees it is not so, the prejudice will be gone.
- Tom Paine

The enormous gap between what US leaders do in the world and what Americans think their leaders are doing is one of the great propaganda accomplishments of the dominant political mythology.
- Michael Parenti, political scientist, author

We can easily forgive a child who is afraid of the dark; the real tragedy of life is when men are afraid of the light.
- Plato

Television is altering the meaning of "being informed" by creating a species of information that might properly be called disinformation... Disinformation does not mean false information. It means misleading information -- misplaced, irrelevant, fragmented or superficial information -- information that creates the illusion of knowing something, but which in fact leads one away from knowing.
- Neil Postman

A cynical, mercenary, demagogic press will produce in time a people as base as itself.
- Joseph Pulitzer

Without seeking, truth cannot be known at all. It can neither be declared from pulpits, nor set down in articles, nor in any wise prepared and sold in packages ready for use. Truth must be ground for every man by itself out of it such, with such help as he can get, indeed, but not without stern labor of his own.
- John Ruskin

Those who are convinced they have a monopoly on The Truth always feel that they are only saving the world when they slaughter the heretics.
- Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. (1888-1965)

Any man who has once acclaimed violence as his method must inexorably choose falsehood as his principle. At its birth, violence acts openly and even with pride. But no sooner does it become strong, firmly established, than it senses the rarefaction of the air around it and it cannot continue to exist without descending into a fog of lies, clothing them in sweet talk. It does not always, not necessarily, openly throttle the throat, more often it demands from its subjects only an oath of allegiance to falsehood, only complicity in falsehood. And the simple step of a simple courageous man is not to partake in falsehood, not to support false actions! Let falsehood enter the world, let it even reign in the world -- but not with my help.
- Alexandr Solzhenitsyn, 1970 Nobel Prize for Literature

Such as it is, the press has become the greatest power within the Western World, more powerful than the legislature, the executive and judiciary. One would like to ask: by whom has it been elected, and to whom is it responsible?
- Alexandr Solzhenitsyn

Jacques Anatole Thibault: See Anatole France

The foulest damage to our political life comes not from the 'secrets' which they hide from us, but from the little bits of half-truth and disinformation which they do tell us. These are already pre-digested, and then are sicked up as little gobbits of authorised spew. The columns of defence correspondents in the establishment sheets serve as the spittoons.
- E.P. Thompson, British historian

Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth.
- Henry D. Thoreau

A person who won't read has no advantage over one who can't read.
- Mark Twain

Beat me with the truth, don't torture me with lies.
- Unknown

Of course, it is possible for any citizen with time to spare, and a canny eye, to work out what is actually going on, but for the many there is not time, and the network news is the only news even though it may not be news at all but only a series of flashing fictions...
- Gore Vidal

As long as people believe in absurdities, they will continue to commit atrocities.
- Voltaire

There is nothing so powerful as truth, and often nothing so strange.
- Daniel Webster

One of the world's greatest problems is the impossibilty of any person searching for the truth on any subject when they believe they already have it.
- Dave Wilbur

When everyone is thinking the same, no one is thinking.
- John Wooden