Half Truth Quotes - Page 4

• The misdeeds of ordinary men can be buried with them, and their lives described in half-truths that are really half-lies. But not a public man. Particularly not this one.

  Anna Quindlen

  Lying, Men, Ordinary

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• Individual human beings are all tools, that the others use to help us all survive.” “That’s a lie.” “No. It’s just a half truth. You can worry about the other half after we win this war.

  Orson Scott Card

  War, Lying, Winning

  Orson Scott Card (2013). “The Ender Quintet”, p.50, Macmillan

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• Recently I began reading my old diaries. Back to before the war. Gradually I became very depressed. The reason for that is probably that I wrote only when there were obstacles and halts to the flow of life, seldom when everything was smooth and even. ... As I read I distinctly felt what a half-truth a diary presents.

  Kathe Kollwitz

  War, Reading, Flow

  Käthe Kollwitz, Hans Kollwitz (1988). “The Diary and Letters of Kaethe Kollwitz”, p.111, Northwestern University Press

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• Seek the truth in all fields, and in that search you will need at least three virtues: courage, zest and modesty. The ancients put that thought in the form of a prayer. They said, “From the cowardice that shrinks from new truth, from the laziness that is content with half truth, from the arrogance that thinks it has all truth – O God of truth, deliver us.

  Hugh B. Brown

  Prayer, Thinking, Zest

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• He [said of one or other eminent colleagues] is a very busy man, and half of what he publishes is true, but I don't know which half.

  Erwin Chargaff

  Truth, Science, Men

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• Aristotle discovered all the half-truths which were necessary to the creation of science.

  Alfred North Whitehead

  Science, Half, Creation

  Alfred North Whitehead (1954). “Dialogues of Alfred North Whitehead”

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• Between the two poles of whole-truth and half-truth is slung the chancy hammock in which we all rock.

  Shana Alexander

  Rocks, Two, Hammocks

  Shana Alexander (1976). “Talking woman”

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• Living out one's faith is either no way to live or the only way to live; it's either imprisonment, or the only path to freedom. It offers happiness, or it frustrates the pursuit. There is no half-love, half-religion, half-worship, half-belief, half-truth. There is no kinda-sorta.

  Tarek Saab

  Catholic, Way, Path

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• We ought not to extract pernicious honey from poison blossoms of misrepresentation and mendacious half-truth, to pamper the course appetite of bigotry and self-love.

  Samuel Taylor Coleridge

  Self, Poison, Half

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• Once one has attained a high level of success at any pursuit and especially an unorthodox pursuit like rowing, one develops a number of generally self-congratulatory half-truths to explain how it happened that he ascended to that particular pinnacle. Often because original motivations don't seem to have much in common with the eventual success, the real and rationalized motivations are difficult to separate.

  Stefan Kieszling

  Motivation, Real, Self

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• One goes to Nature only for hints and half-truths. Her facts are crude until you have absorbed them or translated them ... It is not so much what we see as what the thing seen suggests.

  John Burroughs

  Nature, Truth, Hints

  John Burroughs, Farida Anna Wiley (1997). “John Burroughs' America: Selections from the Writings of the Naturalist”, p.8, Courier Corporation

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• The Adlerians, in the name of "individual psychology," take the side of society against the individual. ... Adler's later thought succumbs to the worst of his earlier banalization. It is conventional, practical, and moralistic. "Our science ... is based on common sense." Common sense, the half-truths of a deceitful society, is honored as the honest truths of a frank world.

  Alfred Adler

  Names, Common Sense, Psychology

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• Both in verse and in prose [Karl] Shapiro loves, partly out of indignation and partly out of sheer mischievousness, to tell the naked truths or half-truths or quarter-truths that will make anybody's hair stand on end; he is always crying: "But he hasn't any clothes on!" about an emperor who is half the time surprisingly well-dressed.

  Randall Jarrell

  Clothes, Hair, Naked

  "The Third Book of Criticism". Book by Randall Jarrell, "Fifty Years of American Poetry", p. 331, 1969.

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• ... the habit of literature [is] the best defense against believing the half-truths of ideologues and the lies of demagogues.

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  Lying, Believe, Defense

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• Lying is the misuse of language. We know that. We need to remember that it works the other way round too. Even with the best intentions, language misused, language used stupidly, carelessly, brutally, language used wrongly, breeds lies, half-truths, confusion. In that sense you can say that grammar is morality. And it is in that sense that I say a writer's first duty is to use language well.

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  Lying, Confusion, Needs

  Ursula K. Le Guin (1998). “Steering the craft: exercises and discussions on story writing for the lone navigator or the mutinous crew”, The Eighth Mountain Press

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• A half-truth does more mischief than a whole lie.

  Ivan Panin

  Lying, Doe, Half

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• In an average day, you may well be confronted with some species of bullying or bigotry, or some ill-phrased appeal to the general will, or some petty abuse of authority. If you have a political loyalty, you may be offered a shady reason for agreeing to a lie or a half-truth that serves some short-term purpose. Everybody devises tactics for getting through such moments; try behaving "as if" they need not be tolerated and are not inevitable.

  Christopher Hitchens

  Loyalty, Bullying, Average

  Christopher Hitchens (2009). “Letters to a Young Contrarian”, p.39, Basic Books

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• Facts are subversive. Subversive of the claims made by democratically elected leaders as well as dictators, by biographers and autobiographers, spies and heroes, torturers and post-modernists. Subversive of lies, half-truths, myths; of all those "easy speeches that comfort cruel men.

  Timothy Garton Ash

  Lying, Hero, Men

  Timothy Garton Ash (2012). “Facts are Subversive: Political Writing from a Decade without a Name”, p.10, Atlantic Books Ltd

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• To think out a problem is not unlike drawing a caricature. You have to exaggerate the salient point and leave out that which is not typical. "To illustrate a principle ," says Bagehot , "you must exaggerate much and you must omit much." As to the quantity of absolute truth in a thought : it seems to me the more comprehensive and unobjectionable a thought becomes, the more clumsy and unexciting it gets. I like half-truths of a certain kind they are interesting and they stimulate.

  Eric Hoffer

  Thinking, Drawing, Interesting

  "Eric Hoffer and the Art of the Notebook" by Tom Bethell in Harper's Magazine, July 2005.

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• On the eve of the election last month my wife Judith and I were driving home late in the afternoon and turned on the radio for the traffic and weather. What we instantly got was a freak show of political pornography: lies, distortions, and half-truths - half-truths being perhaps the blackest of all lies. They paraded before us as informed opinion.

  Bill Moyers

  Lying, Home, Weather

  "Now" on PBS with David Brancaccio, www.pbs.org. December 17, 2004.

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• [...] it is generally accepted that the Civil War was fought over the issue of slavery. That, at best, is a half-truth. Slavery was an issue, but the primary force for war was a clash between the economic interests of the North and the South. Even the issue of slavery itself was based on economics.

  G. Edward Griffin

  War, Issues, Half

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• God hates the LUKEWARM GOSPEL OF HALF-TRUTHS that is now spreading over the Globe. This gospel says, 'Just believe in Jesus and you'll be Saved. There's nothing more to it.' It ignores the Whole Counsel of God, which speaks of Repenting from former Sins, of Taking up your Cross, of being conformed to the Image of Christ by the refining work of the Holy Spirit. It is totally silent about the Reality of Hell and an After-Death Judgment.

  David Wilkerson

  Death, God, Faith

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