Alice Dreger Quotes

Writers don't have to keep themselves honest. They have to keep themselves accurate.

I think you get into trouble as an author and a journalist when, rather than owning the gaps, you try to elide them.

Never question the relevance of truth, but always question the truth of relevance.

What a word is truth. Slippery, tricky, unreliable. I tried in these books to tell the truth.

First and foremost, you want to be truthful as a storyteller.

Certainly today we are incredibly tolerant of untruth.

… he who makes an assertion without knowing whether it is true or false, is guilty of falsehood; and the accidental truth of the assertion, does not justify or excuse him.

When truth and error have fair play, the former is always an overmatch for the latter.

Truth is a standard both of itself and of falsity.

Clearly, you can't believe everything you read in the press.

I can't fudge what I write. But I can certainly fudge what I say.

In my career, I do not stop for news when it's not true.

I don't give false claims any due.

If something is presented as a fact, it has to be correct.

When I am giving the relation of a thing, remember to abstain from altering either in the matter or manner of speaking, so much, as that, if every one, afterwards, should alter as much, it would at last come to be properly false.

I would never lie to anyone about history.

No man has a good enough memory to be a successful liar.

Just because you read a report in the 'New York Times,' the 'Economist,' or, yes, 'The New Yorker' doesn't make it true. But we do know that a few people have evaluated that story with what strikes me as fairly objective standards of reason.

You need to tell the truth to the audience, or they will throw a brick through the TV. They'll turn you off.

I am bound to tell what I am told, but not in every case to believe it.

Whether the story reflects the facts is obviously a different matter.

Accuracy is the twin brother of honesty; inaccuracy, of dishonesty.

Truth is simply a compliment paid to sentences seen to be paying their way.

My purpose is to make my narrative as truthful as possible.

Accuracy of statement is one of the first elements of truth; inaccuracy is a near kin to falsehood.