If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us.

The quick pain of truth can pass away, but the slow eating agony of a lie is never lost.

When you want to help people, you tell them the truth. When you want to help yourself, you tell them what they want to hear.

Truly, to tell lies is not honorable; but when the truth entails tremendous ruin, to speak dishonorably is pardonable.

The liar is no better than the thief, and if his mendacity takes the form of slander he may be worse than most thieves. It puts a premium upon knavery untruthfully to attack an honest man, or even with hysterical exaggeration to assail a bad man with untruth.

Without courage, we cannot practice any other virtue with consistency. We can't be kind, true, merciful, generous, or honest.

We hang the petty thieves and appoint the great ones to public office.

Plato is my friend; Aristotle is my friend, but my greatest friend is truth.

The truth is not wonderful enough to suit the newspapers; so they enlarge upon it and invent ridiculous embellishments.

Let us affirm what seems to be the truth, that, whether one is or is not, one and the others in relation to themselves and one another, all of them, in every way, are and are not, and appear to be and appear not to be.

The truth is like a lion; you don’t have to defend it. Let it loose; it will defend itself.

There is but one thing of real value—to cultivate truth and justice, and to live without anger in the midst of lying and unjust men.

Be true to your work, your word, and your friend.

There are very few human beings who receive the truth, complete and staggering, by instant illumination. Most of them acquire it fragment by fragment, on a small scale, by successive developments, cellularly, like a laborious mosaic.

Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute.

And even a liar can be scared into telling the truth, same as honest man can be tortured into telling a life.

There is no rampart that will hold out against malice.

None of us knows what might happen even the next minute, yet still we go forward. Because we trust. Because we have Faith.

People think that a liar gains a victory over his victim. What I've learned is that a lie is an act of self-abdication, because one surrenders one's reality to the person to whom one lies, making that person one's master, condemning oneself from then on to faking the sort of reality that person's view requires to be faked.