To anger a conservative, lie to him. To anger a liberal, tell him the truth.
- Topic: Criticism, Truth
- Photo: Jeffrey Benjamin
More Quotes from Theodore Roosevelt
If you could kick the person in the pants responsible for most of your trouble, you wouldn’t sit for a month.
There is no room in this country for hyphenated Americanism… The one absolutely certain way of brining this nation to ruin, of preventing all possibility of its continuing to be a nation at all, would be to permit it to become a tangle of squabbling nationalities.
We demand that big business give the people a square deal; in return we must insist that when anyone engaged in big business honestly endeavors to do right he shall be given a square deal.
The best executive is the one who has sense enough to pick good men to do what he wants done, and self-restraint to keep from meddling with them while they do it.
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The artist doesn’t have time to listen to the critics. The ones who want to be writers read the reviews, the ones who want to write don’t have the time to read reviews.
The day you stop caring what other people think of you, is the day your life begins.
How much time he gains who does not look to see what his neighbor says or does or thinks, but only at what he does himself, to make it just and holy.
The lion doesn't turn around when the small dog barks.
To criticize is to appreciate, to appropriate, to take intellectual possession, to establish in fine a relation with the criticized thing and to make it one's own.
Criticism may not be agreeable, but it is necessary. It fulfills the same function as pain in the human body. It calls attention to an unhealthy state of things.
I have endured a great deal of ridicule without much malice; and have received a great deal of kindness, not quite free from ridicule. I am used to it.
Being aware of a single shortcoming within yourself is far more useful than being aware of a thousand in someone else!
To offend a strong man, tell him a lie. To offend a weak man, tell him the truth.
The quick pain of truth can pass away, but the slow eating agony of a lie is never lost.
Nothing can now be believed which is seen in the newspaper. Truth itself becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle.
Only when we realize that there is no eternal, unchanging truth or absolute truth can we arouse in ourselves a sense of intellectual responsibility.
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.
Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.
The best people possess a feeling for beauty, the courage to take risks, the discipline to tell the truth, the capacity for sacrifice. Ironically, their virtues make them vulnerable; they are often wounded, sometimes destroyed.
If most of us remain ignorant of ourselves, it is because self-knowledge is painful and we prefer the pleasures of illusion.
Without properly kept accounts it is impossible to maintain truth in its pristine purity.
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.
