Top 100 To Tell The Truth Quotes
#1. It's essential to tell the truth at all times. This will reduce life's pain. Lying distorts reality. All forms of distorted thinking must be corrected.
John Bradshaw
#2. The one thing necessary in life, as in art is to tell the truth.
Leo Tolstoy
#3. 'Billboard' needs to tell the truth, shake things up.
Prince
#5. There's no reason to be offended if someone is being honest and tactful. To tell the truth in kindness is a huge favor. To help people avoid the wrong path, or get on the right one, can save them years of frustration. In the end, candor grows respect.
Nancy K. Eberhardt
#6. The Kafka paradox: art depends on truth, but truth, being indivisable, cannot know itself: to tell the truth is to lie. thus the writer is the truth, and yet when he speaks he lies.
Franz Kafka
#7. What matters is whether we want to lie or to tell the truth and write the truth, even though it never can be the truth and never is the truth.
Thomas Bernhard
#8. Just because a movie is satisfactory means that the person who makes it is satisfactory. One can make a wonderful movie but still not be a wonderful person. In terms of interviews, it's probably not a good idea, because moviemakers tend not to tell the truth, even when asked a question.
Mamoru Oshii
#9. To tell the truth, my dear count, I must own that of all nauseating human emanations, literature is one of those which disgust me most. I can see nothing in it but compromise and flattery. And I go so far as to doubt whether it can be anything else.
Andre Gide
#10. I think what makes us human is those choices - whether to tell the truth or not.
Ricky Gervais
#11. I'm not ashamed to tell the truth about what happened in my family. I think that's what makes my comedy different.
Bernie Mac
#12. It's hard to tell the truth, and yet the truth is that she's the one who's rejected me.
Anne Frank
#13. In a memoir, your main contract with the reader is to tell the truth, no matter how bizarre.
Edmund White
#15. Fiction becomes a weird way to countenance yourself and to tell the truth instead of being a way to escape yourself or present yourself in a way you figure you will be maximally likable.
David Foster Wallace
#16. You want to cry aloud for your mistakes. But to tell the truth the world doesn't need any more of that sound.
Mary Oliver
#17. What a word is truth. Slippery, tricky, unreliable. I tried in these books to tell the truth.
Lillian Hellman
#18. What is the compulsion to tell the truth if not a moral compulsion? Jacqueline Delon had asked. She was wrong. It's a survival necessity. You can't live if you can't accept what you are, and you can't accept what you are if you can't say what you do. The power of naming, as old as Adam. We
Glen Duncan
#19. I just don't want the fear from the right to be used by the [Barack] Obama administration to silence critics. We have to be willing to tell the truth because we're trying to speak about conditions that are being rendered invisible in our prisons and schools in the hood and so forth and so on.
Cornel West
#20. But, to tell the truth, a soldier doesn't notice a war much more than a civilian does, except his own tiny piece of it and that just on the days it is happening.
Robert A. Heinlein
#21. The time has come to tell the truth about the corruption of the government employee unions in this country.
Newt Gingrich
#22. There were people who lied for gain, people who lied from pain, people who lied simply because the concept of telling the truth was utterly alien to them ... and then there were people who lied because they were waiting for it to be time to tell the truth.
Stephen King
#23. When evil rules a time and place, certain good people are called upon to tell the truth to those who don't want to hear it.
Anne F. Rockwell
#24. I've tried to tell the truth. But I would say that, wouldn't I? In any case it has to be my truth. What other truth could I possibly know?
Tony Garnett
#25. I want to use my gifts to tell the truth, and to tell it as beautifully as I can.
Andrew Peterson
#26. But what physician has not had patients who don't make any sense at all? To tell the truth, they're our stock-in-trade. We talk and write about the ones we can make sense of.
Walker Percy
#27. Some would ask what country am I from? We ara supposed to tell the truth, [so] we tell them India. Some thought it was Indiana, not India! Some did not know where India is. I said the country next to Pakistan.
Thomas L. Friedman
#28. There are two ways to worry words. One is hoping for the greatest possible beauty in what is created. The other is to tell the truth.
June Jordan
#29. It is better to tell the truth and face the punishment, than to lie and face the consequences.
Anthony Liccione
#31. It feels so good to tell the truth.
Foxy Brown
#32. On Mother's Day: It's just a rip-off, to tell the truth, a chance to sell my perfume and other things that ladies like.
Elizabeth Taylor
#33. To tell the truth is a super avantguarde creative act
El Roto
#34. Palaces are built on the people's bones. To tell the truth, the masses would be better off without kingdoms, which is why it takes a gifted ruler to tell just the right lies so they never realize it.
Fuyumi Ono
#35. My way of joking is to tell the truth. It's the funniest joke in the world.
George Bernard Shaw
#36. There is no trick to writing a believable love story, a heartbreaking scene or real-sounding dialogue. All you need is to tell the truth. It's always heartbreaking.
Ethan Hawke
#37. You know I took an oath to tell the truth when I took the witness stand.
Mary Harris Jones
#38. One of the hallmarks of an evolved person is the ability to tell the truth with no fear of punishment or expectation of reward
Gay Hendricks
#39. The psychoanalytic liberation of memory explodes the rationality of the repressed individual. As cognition gives way to re-cognition, the forbidden images and impulses of childhood begin to tell the truth that reason denies.
Herbert Marcuse
#40. All I can hope to teach my son is to tell the truth and fear no man.
Edward R. Murrow
#41. I'm simply trying to tell the truth about human behaviour as I see it.
Sarah Kane
#42. It's been unsettling to discover that every form of narrative, even one that purports to tell the truth, is a kind of lying.
Damon Galgut
#43. Whether a man chooses to tell the truth in long sentences or short jokes is a problem analogous to whether he chooses to tell the truth in French or in German.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
#44. Your first obligation as a writer is to tell the truth and to tell a good story.
Lena Waithe
#45. To tell the truth I cannot call my childhood bad. In your childhood you can't compare things: one eats carrots, one eats candy, both taste good. As a child you cannot tell the difference.
Roman Abramovich
#46. There is a great deal at stake here, many writers fight this battle and most lose it. what is at stake for the writer? freedom of invention, freedom to tell the truth, in all its particulars, freedom to imagine new structures.
Andrea Dworkin
#47. Just give yourself permission to tell the truth to yourself.
Iyanla Vanzant
#48. A lot of people are afraid to tell the truth, to say no. That's where toughness comes into play. Toughness is not being a bully. It's having backbone.
Robert Kiyosaki
#50. You can read everybody. It's not even interesting to tell the truth because to some extent it's false.
Charles Olson
#51. I found that stiffly saluting member, of which he was so proud, rather frightening, and to tell the truth I found his pride slightly comical. I thought that that must be embarrassing for him, and thought how much more pleasant it was to be a girl. That, by the way, is an opinion I still hold today.
Anne Desclos
#52. For me as an actor, daring is to tell the truth - to be yourself, no matter how the world interacts with that.
Taylor Schilling
#53. This is our lives. The way to give it dignity is to tell the truth.
Lee Grant
#54. It's difficult to tell the truth about how a book begins. The truth, as far as it can be presented to other people, is either wholly banal or too intimate.
Zadie Smith
#55. Do I detect a renewal of your fighting spirit? I'm so glad. To tell the truth, I've been getting quite bored. Bring it on, Grace--I'm waiting for you.
B.A. Paris
#56. People assume actors are born liars, but I'd argue the actor's job is to tell the truth. And I've realised I'm not a good liar.
Cate Blanchett
#57. My intent is to tell the truth as I know it, realizing that what is true for me may be blasphemy for others.
Gerry Spence
#58. But my parents had taught me that everybody deserved respect, no matter if they were pansies or not, and to tell the truth, I was nothing to write home about in the physical looks department.
Robert McCammon
#59. Happiness consists of being able to tell the truth without hurting anyone.
Marcello Mastroianni
#60. We long for our churches to be safe places to doubt, to ask questions, and to tell the truth, even when it's uncomfortable.
Rachel Held Evans
#61. The writer's first job is not to have opinions but to tell the truth ... and refuse to be an accomplice of lies and misinformation. Literature is the house of nuance and contrariness against the voices of simplification.
Susan Sontag
#62. I am a writer and a feminist, and the two seem to be constantly in conflict ... ever since I became loosely involved with it, it has seemed to me one of the recurring ironies of this movement that there is no way to tell the truth about it without, in some small way, seeming to hurt it.
Nora Ephron
#63. I'm just writing about people. People are dark and complicated. I'm trying to tell the truth; that's all that I do.
David Lindsay-Abaire
#64. Citizens have to fight suppression of information on matters of vital public importance. To tell the truth is not a crime.
Edward Snowden
#65. We must begin to train lawyers the minute they walk into law school to tell the truth. They must immediately begin to learn the business of representing people. They must be assigned cases the first day.
Gerry Spence
#66. For all that the papers would say I was a liar, I took the words I was saying at briefings as seriously as Tony Blair took what he would say at the Despatch Box. I find it very difficult not to tell the truth. I felt I was accountable for what I said.
Alastair Campbell
#67. The law of England is a very strange one; it cannot compel anyone to tell the truth ... But what the law can do is to give you seven years for not telling the truth.
Charles Darling, 1st Baron Darling
#68. The message is now seared in my mind: To tell the truth is to lie; to lie is to tell the truth.
Chris Lemig
#69. I've lied all my life. I'm just now learning how to tell the truth, and I'm not going to start playing games again, especially not with you.
Collette West
#70. You told me to tell the truth, and this is exactly why I didn't want to. You want me to think I'm selfish."
"I want you to own your thoughts and actions, and not be afraid of them. Accepting your limitations is every bit as important as embracing your strengths.
Dawn Jayne
#71. Novels are fictions and therefore they tell lies, but through those lies every novelist attempts to tell the truth about the world.
Paul Auster
#72. In my experience, honest people don't need to put their hand on a Bible to tell the truth, and with dishonest people, it makes no difference.
Paul Levine
#73. I have risked everything to tell the truth. Tell the truth
Maya Angelou
#74. I don't really like lies. I prefer to tell the truth whenever possible. It's much easier to keep track of.
Morgan Rhodes
#75. It takes two seconds to tell the truth and it costs nothing. A lie takes time and it costs everything.
Randi Rhodes
#76. It's dangerous to tell the truth, truth without power is always dangerous. And we should fight! Freedom's not an idea, it's a passion! If you haven't got it you fight like a fish out of water fighting for air!
Edward Bond
#77. To tell the truth, girls are no longer the way they used to be. They play gangsters, nowadays, just like boys. They organize rackets. They plan holdups and practice karate. They will rape defenseless adolescents. They wear pants ... Life has become impossible.
Alain Robbe-Grillet
#78. 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.
Ernest Hemingway,
#79. Everyone hopes it will be easier for kids. Maybe the goal in America is to have an easy life, and so we find it too disgraceful to tell the truth.
Matthew Quick
#80. I love how simple this is for her. I love that her solution to everything is to tell the truth. I struggle with my identity and she tells me just to say what's true.
Nicola Yoon
#81. I like to do my principal research in bars, where people are more likely to tell the truth or, at least, lie less convincingly than they do in briefings and books.
P. J. O'Rourke
#82. To tell the truth, I couldn't care less about the relativity of knowledge, simply because the world does not deserve to be known.
Emil Cioran
#83. It doesn't matter what race you are. It doesn't matter what religion you are. I always tell people: If you want to be a part of hip-hop, you just need to have a heart. You need to have the courage to tell the truth.
Immortal Technique
#84. It is, perhaps, a debatable question, whether a person who has always been notoriously in the habit of lying, has a right to tell the truth; it is, of course, the only device by which he can deceive people.
George D. Prentice
#85. Great men tell the truth and are never believed. Lesser men are always believed, but seldom have the brains or the courage to tell the truth.
Kenneth Roberts
#86. I'm actually a very honest person, and sometimes I end up like, 'Man, I said too much.' It's hard for me not to tell the truth when you ask me.
Drake
#87. Sometimes you have to tell the truth about some of the stuff you've done so that people will believe you when you tell them the truth about other stuff you haven't done.
Brock Clarke
#88. I have a theory, too, that the best and only answer to a smear or to an honest misunderstanding of the facts is to tell the truth
Richard M. Nixon
#89. WikiLeaks serves as a back-up for those who want to tell the truth about the inner workings of government when the mainstream media is not willing or taking too long to publish.
Daniel Ellsberg
#90. Everyone has the right to tell the truth about her own life.
Ellen Bass
#91. Theology is an attempt to explain a subject by men who do not understand it. The intent is not to tell the truth but to satisfy the questioner.
Elbert Hubbard
#92. The story of undocumented immigrants in this country is not just about undocumented immigrants. It's about the country as a whole, and it's about us being able to tell the truth about where we are with this issue because we haven't been telling the truth about where we are with this issue.
Jose Antonio Vargas
#93. Everyday in heat, rain or cold, I ran - alone in the woods - in the hills near our home. There I felt the gentle touch of God. I head Him whisper, 'You're stronger now. It's time to tell the truth of what happened. Tell your story to give hope to others.
Nikki Rosen
#94. The more horrible the truth that you admit, the better you connect. You have to tell the truth.
Jill Soloway
#95. [L]et us say that we are obliged to produce the truth by the power that demands truth and needs it in order to function: we are forced to tell the truth, we are constrained, we are condemned to admit the truth or to discover it.
Michel Foucault
#96. I don't want to tell President Obama how to make a speech. He's a much better speech maker than I am. But I think always to tell the truth in a sometimes blatant way, even though it might be temporarily unpopular, is the best approach.
Jimmy Carter
#98. It is not worth while to strain one's self to tell the truth to people who habitually discount everything you tell them, whether it is true or isn't.
Mark Twain
#99. The only rule I have when writing is to try to tell the truth. That doesn't mean you can't exaggerate, edit, rewrite things to make them more dramatic. But emotional truth is what I look for in writing.
Erica Jong
#100. Picasso said, 'Art is a lie that tells the truth.' What if you just want to tell the truth and not lie about it?
Nicolas Cage
