Top 100 Quotes About Truth Telling
#1. Commitment to truth telling lays the groundwork for the openness and honesty that is the heartbeat of love. When we see ourselves as we truly are and accept ourselves, we build the necessary foundation for self-love.
Bell Hooks
#2. Only very odd people don't realize that truth-telling is always a relative value.
John Gardner
#3. My function as a writer is not story-telling but truth-telling: to make things plain.
Laura Riding
#4. I mean only to call attention to the fact that there is a certain measure of arbitrariness in the forms that truth-telling may take.
Neil Postman
#5. Above all, I would teach him to tell the truth Truth-telling, I have found, is the key to responsible citizenship. The thousands of criminals I have seen in 40 years of law enforcement have had one thing in common: Every single one was a liar.
J. Edgar Hoover
#6. Character is that quality of mind which makes truth-telling instinctive rather than strange.
Douglas Southall Freeman
#7. Truth-telling to Congress and the public is not disloyal in America: it is an expression of the higher loyalty officials owe to the Constitution, the rule of law, and the sovereign public. It is a courageous, patriotic, and effective way to serve our country. The time to speak out is now.
Daniel Ellsberg
#8. Poetry is a special use of language that opens onto the real. The business of the poet is truth telling, which is why in the Celtic tradition no one could be a teacher unless he or she was a poet.
Huston Smith
#9. It was a lie but he believed in telling lies to people. Truth telling and medicine just didn't go together except in dire emergencies, if then.
Mario Puzo
#10. Truth telling is the first building block of character
a quality that seems to be getting rarer and rarer in all-forgiving America.
Mona Charen
#11. But now the train had finally begun to move, and Albie had switched the fearless truth-telling eye of his camera lens from his untied laces to the walls of the tunnels under east London, because you can never have enough pictures of dirty concrete.
David Nicholls
#12. I need grace and truth-telling and camaraderie from other moms. I need us to tell the truth about how hard it is, and I need us to help each other, instead of hiding behind the pretense and pressure of perfection.
Shauna Niequist
#13. Here's a good test to know whether or not truth-telling springs from love. Truth will not only pain those who hear it; it will pain those who speak it. If we don't love someone, it won't hurt at all to speak truth. We'll tell them what we think with no regard for their feelings. If
Philip Gulley
#14. Lying eats into the soul. If it becomes a habit it frays the edge of your spirit. Truth telling, although sometimes harder to do, strengthens your heart. It serves a person ill not to tell the truth.
Theresa Breslin
#15. I seem most instinctively to believe in the human value of creative writing, whether in the form of verse or fiction, as a mode of truth-telling, self-expression and homage to the twin miracles of creation and consciousness.
John Updike
#16. Truth-telling by a leader can legitimate truth-telling at every level.
Parker J. Palmer
#17. Truth telling, therefore, has to be an ultimate value, until it clashes with another ultimate value, pleasure, at which point, to state the obvious, there is conflict.
Hanif Kureishi
#18. Commodified fantasy takes no risks: it invents nothing, but imitates and trivializes. It proceeds by depriving the old stories of their intellectual and ethical complexity, turning their action into violence, their actors to dolls, and their truth-telling to sentimental platitude.
Karen Haber
#19. Father taught me to like wht he called 'discussion', she recalled. Margaret Thatcher never repudiated the Methodism of her childhood, with its reverence for truth-telling, hard work and puting into practice the teachings of Scripture. page 6
Charles Moore
#20. The time has come for women and men to band together to jointly create gender harmony. We must gather in mixed group to plumb new depths of relational awareness, courageous truth-telling, compassionate listening, empathic sensitivity, and mutual healing.
William Keepin
#21. Truth-telling may be an ethic, adopted by photojournalists as a behavior, but experience shows us that it is not embedded in the medium like silver salts in film.
Andy Grundberg
#22. I'd always liked our inside jokes the best - they made me feel more connected to Amy than any amount of confessional truth-telling or passionate lovemaking or talk-till-sunrising.
Gillian Flynn
#23. The heart of justice is truth telling, seeing ourselves and the world the way it is rather than the way we want to be.
Bell Hooks
#24. From an early age, I had the idea that writing was truth-telling. It's on the record. Everybody can see it. Maybe it goes back to the sacred origins of literature - the holy book. There's nothing holy about it for me, but it should be serious, and it should be totally transparent.
Edmund White
#25. People think the blues is sad. They hear people moaning and such. That's not the blues. That's just somebody singing slow ... The blues is about truth-telling.
Alberta Hunter
#26. The laughter that happens when people are truth-telling and showing up and being real - I call that "knowing laughter." That's what happens between people when we recognize the absurdity of the belief that we're alone in anything.
Brene Brown
#27. The most direct way has been to ask people how much effort it took them to produce a deceptive or truthful message. People find lying more difficult than truth telling (Caso, Gnisci, Vrij, & Mann, 2005; Vrij, Semin, & Bull, 1996). As
Anonymous
#28. Trust grows when people see leaders translate their personal integrity into organizational fidelity. At the heart of fidelity lies truth-telling and promise-keeping.
Max De Pree
#29. Judaism for me is a sensibility of collective self-questioning and uncomfortable truth-telling. I feel a debt of responsibility to this past. It is why I am Jewish.
Tony Judt
#30. Honesty is more than not lying. It is truth telling, truth speaking, truth living, and truth loving.
James E. Faust
#31. In an oppressive society the truth-telling nature of literature is of a different order, and sometimes valued more highly than other elements in a work of art.
Julian Barnes
#34. When men and women punish each other for truth telling, we reinforce the notion that lies are better.
Bell Hooks
#35. We raise the hypothesis that truth telling may be the natural response absent clear motivations to lie (hence, most human communication) and that lying may prevail as the automatic reaction when it brings about important self-profit.
Anonymous
#36. Healing begins at truth-telling. Tame your emotions and focus on what matters.
Jo Ann Fore
#37. Truth telling is an investment we must make in relationships - whether personal or professional. It takes a lot of time and thought, and sometimes, courage. However, there is probably not another investment of time that pays a greater dividend when done well.
Dee Ann Turner
#38. I like children; I like 'em, and I respect 'em. Pretty much all the honest truth-telling there is in the world is done by them.
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
#39. To tell the truth, I never think about a homer. I'm just thinking of the situation and what I've got to do when I go to the plate.
Sammy Sosa
#40. The truth shouldn't be told only when it's convenient. Honesty must be a way of life.
Frank Sonnenberg
#41. What I've found - and the older I get, the more I understand this and stand behind it - is, my whole life has been an exploration of telling the truth. It's scary to be truthful, and it's scary to reveal yourself, and I'm very attracted to doing things that scare me.
Jane Wiedlin
#42. Most people don't care if you're telling them the truth or if you're telling them a lie, as long as they're entertained by it.
Tom Waits
#43. Once I had feared that telling the truth would be like falling, that love would be like hitting the ground, but here I was, my feet firmly planted, standing on my own.
Rachel Hartman
#45. The conqueror writes history, they came, they conquered and they write. You don't expect the people who came to invade us to tell the truth about us ...
Miriam Makeba
#46. Telling the truth after proper investigation is the height of courage.
Wafa Sultan
#47. They suppress the truth rather than take the consequence of telling it, and in so doing prove themselves a part of the human family.
Frederick Douglass
#48. 'Whale Talk' is a tough book, but it is also a compassionate book about telling the truth and about redemption. I didn't draw the tough parts out of thin air; they are stories handed to me by people in pain.
Chris Crutcher
#49. Telling the truth ... is not solely a matter of moral character; it is also a matter of correct appreciation of real situations and of serious reflection upon them.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
#50. Integrity is a bugger, it really is. Lying can get you into difficulties, but to really wind up in the crappers try telling nothing but the truth.
David Mitchell
#51. But as a wise and great teacher once explained so patiently, all good stories - stories that touch your soul, stories that change your nature, stories that cause you to become a better person from their telling-these stories always contain truth.
Camron Wright
#52. The elegant Lord Shaftesbury somewhere objects to telling too much truth: by which it may be fairly inferred, that, in some cases, to lie is not only excusable but commendable. And
Henry Fielding
#53. The story unfolded quickly as I typed, in a way I was becoming familiar with. There was something about putting the truth on paper, bringing facts into the light of day where everyone could look at them, that made my fingers move faster -- it was becoming one of my favorite sensations on earth.
Gwenda Bond
#54. On the one hand, we may tell the truth, regardless of consequences, and on the other hand we may mellow it and sophisticate it to make it humane and tolerable.
H.L. Mencken
#56. Perhaps one day the man in the black jacket will think about this too: why he only wondered if it was Kevin or Amat who was telling the truth. Why Maya's word wasn't enough.
Fredrik Backman
#58. The whole 'Melrose' series is an attempt to tell the truth, and is based on the idea that there is some salutary or liberating power in telling the truth.
Edward St. Aubyn
#59. People want biography. People want memoir. They want you to tell them that the story you're telling them is true. The thing I'm telling you is true, but it did not always happen to me.
Dorothy Allison
#60. Whatever we had is over. It died the minute I walked downstairs and realized the world I'd always known was a lie.- Blaire Wynn
Abbi Glines
#61. Don't bend; don't water it down; don't try to make it logical; don't edit your own soul according to the fashion. Rather, follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly.
Franz Kafka
#63. -I suck cock because I like cock. I like getting my cock sucked and I really--yes, really--like sucking the cocks of other men! And you know what I like the best of all? I like sticking my cock up some other man's ass!
Tali Spencer
#64. Fear is a place where you just tell the truth
Clive Barker
#65. Silence becomes cowardice when occasion demands speaking out the whole truth and acting accordingly.
Mahatma Gandhi
#66. If people are always comfortable with you, you're probably not telling them the whole truth.
Aniekee Tochukwu Ezekiel
#67. Loving someone is helping them when they get in trouble, and looking after them, and telling them the truth ...
Mark Haddon
#68. A story is not a thing. A story is an act. It only exists in the brief moment of its telling. The question you must ask is what a story has the power to do. The truth of something you do is very different from the truth of something you know.
Matthew J. Kirby
#69. I was always a liar. But one thing I failed to realize about being a liar is that you know when you are deceiving someone else, but when you deceive yourself you believe you are telling the truth.
Jack Gantos
#70. There is a case for telling the truth; there is a case for avoiding the scandal; but there is no possible defense for the man who tells the scandal, but does not tell the truth
Gilbert K. Chesterton
#71. You can't stay well without telling
and living
the truth.
Martha Beck
#72. Truth will keep on telling the truth
Lies will lie to be more uncouth
No more rainbow after the storm
Nowhere to escape leaving the norm
Munia Khan
#73. On the way there hoop had talked to him about pain, telling him that it was a fleeting thing, a physical reaction to damage that he knew would do him no harm, and that afterward he wouldn't actually be able to remember what the pain. Had felt like.
Tim Lebbon
#74. When life tries to define you with its hardship, you gotta push back, look it straight in the eye and say, 'No matter what life throws at me, I'm going to keep telling myself that I will overcome.' And every time you own that truth, you write your own life script.
Nikki Rosen
#75. If you will refrain from telling any lies about the Republican Party, I'lll promise not to tell the truth about the Democrats.
Chauncey Depew
#76. Telling the truth without sensitivity can be a form of abuse.
Frank Hall
#77. But a funny thing happens when you tell a man that you don't want to get married: they don't believe you. They think you're lying to yourself or to them or you're trying to trick them in some way and you end up being made to feel worse for just telling the truth.
Jami Attenberg
#78. In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act. - Orwell
Amie Kaufman
#79. Marriage is not mainly about being or staying in love. It's mainly about telling the truth with our lives. It's about portraying something true about Jesus Christ and the way He relates to his people. It is about showing in real life the glory of the gospel.
John Piper
#80. Atticus sometimes said that one way to tell whether a witness was lying or telling the truth was to listen rather than watch.
Harper Lee
#81. Do you thinking not getting caught in a lie is the same thing as telling the truth?
Robert Redford from the 1975 movie Three Days of the Condor
James Grady
#82. Personally, I felt terrible for telling Truth my name was Schnitzeldoodle. I still think about it. Sometimes I just have to rock myself back and forth and say, You've offended so many people at this point. Don't try to keep track now, girl.
Chelsea Handler
#83. Men understand direct communication. It's bitches who speak in code.
Kristen Ashley
#84. And even a liar can be scared into telling the truth, same as honest man can be tortured into telling a lie.
William Faulkner
#85. Men are sometimes hanged for telling the truth.
Joan Of Arc
#86. Is not anyone with any degree of mental honesty conscious of telling lies all day long, both in talking and writing, simply because lies will fall into artistic shape when truth will not?
George Orwell
#87. When you find that people are not telling you the truth
look out!
Agatha Christie
#88. The startling truth is this: as this narrative unfolded, amidst all the voices breaking free, telling their stories for the first time, the loudest voice of all was that of Norman Rockwell.
Jane Allen Petrick
#89. When people lie to me they're telling me I'm not worth the truth.
Lauren Dane
#90. As Commander in Chief of the United States Military, I will never send our sons and daughters and our brothers and sisters to die in a foreign land without telling the truth about why they're going there.
Howard Dean
#91. I am not writing to flatter paternal egotism, to echo cant, or prop up humbug; I am merely telling the truth.
Charlotte Bronte
#92. During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act.
George Orwell
#93. If you are telling the truth, then you can speak gently, and your words will have power.
Chogyam Trungpa
#95. Follow our hearts. Live our dreams. Tell the truth.
Zoe McLellan
#96. That was the trouble with not being right in the head. You couldn't always tell if your eyes were telling the truth.
Christina Henry
#97. Okay, you're telling the truth. By the way, Nick, you have the most screwed-up life. You're either boring as all get out, or you're about to die. There's no middle ground with you. You might want to work on that.
Sherrilyn Kenyon
#98. I use a lot of humor, and I follow the saying that if you want to tell people the truth, you better make them laugh first, otherwise, they will shoot you. So I can tell you a joke and maybe you will laugh at the beginning. But it's not about telling jokes.
Sayed Kashua
#100. I don't think telling the truth ever gets anyone in trouble in the long run. Maybe the day after, but not in the long run.
Steve Spurrier
