David Gergen Quotes

Truth is, in fact, an elusive concept. It depends almost entirely on where you are standing at the time. It is a human instinct to confuse belief with truth.

There is no such thing as a true tale. Truth has many faces and the truth is like to the old road to Avalon; it depends on your own will, and your own thoughts, whither the road will take you.

Your version of the truth is all that matters.

A lot of what we're doing here deals with perception rather than truth. Many would argue that reality depends more on the former than the latter.

Perception is reality.

Each person does see the world in a different way. There is not a single, unifying, objective truth. We're all limited by our perspective.

All of us create our own versions of an event, of our lives, even, not because we're liars, necessarily, but because we can only see and understand the truth from our own viewpoint, and a shifting viewpoint at that.

Truth, after all, wears a different face to everybody, and it would be too tedious to wait till all were agreed.

We never stop to consider that our beliefs are only a relative truth that's always going to be distorted by all the knowledge we have stored in our memory.

I'm less interested in reality. I'm more interested in perception, the truth of the universe that we see.

The truth is whatever people will believe is the truth.

It depends on which reality you take and which reality I take.” (p. 318).

Everybody experiences reality in a way that's only true for them.

I'm coming 'round to the view that there's only a personal view of the world.

Reality is a question of perspective.

There can be many opinions on a thing, but there is only one truth." Vashet smiled lazily. "And if the pursuit of the truth was my goal, that would concern me." She gave a long yawn, stretching like a happy cat. "Instead I will focus on the joy in my heart, [...}

Truth, after all, wears a different face to everybody, and it would be too tedious to wait till all were agreed. She is said to lie at the bottom of a well, for the very reason, perhaps, that whoever looks down in search of her sees his own image at the bottom, and is persuaded not only that he has seen the goddess, but that she is far better looking than he had imagined.

There may always be another reality to make fiction of the truth we think we've arrived at.

One geometry cannot be more true than another; it can only be more convenient.

Truth is whatever people will believe.

The place for truth is not in the facts of a novel; it is in the feelings.

Amazing what people make up based on what they choose to see.

There is no way you can use the word “reality” without quotation marks around it.

All politicians operate within an Orwellian nimbus where words don't mean what they normally mean, but Rovism posits that there is no objective, verifiable reality at all. Reality is what you say it is.

The truth is the thing I invented so I could live.