John Hodgman Quotes

How do I hold my truth to be the truth when everyone else believes their truth to be different.

It's deeply humbling to realize that there is no such thing as a society with a purchase on truth.

I'm interested in such things as the difference between how we perceive the world and what the world turns out to be. The difference is between the stories we tell others and the stories we tell ourselves. There is a wonderful Russian saying, which I use as the epigraph of one of my novels, which goes, He lies like an eyewitness. Which is very sly, clever and true.

Perception is reality.

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

I preach there are all kinds of truth, your truth and somebody else's. But behind all of them there is only one truth and that is that there's no truth.

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.

All media exist to invest our lives with artificial perceptions and arbitrary values

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.

If we can't agree on objective truth, then how are we ever going to agree on opinions?

When I look back at my life and think about what really happened, my memory is obscured by the stories I've created out of those incidents. In stories, as reality melds with art, the result sometimes feels truer than real life.

It's become a cliche to say that a piece of drama is about 'the nature of truth.' But 'Rectify' so openly plays with the slippery nature of memory that the label directly applies.

We're awash in toxic memes right now. One of the most toxic, I think because it enables so many others, is the idea that truth doesn't matter, that truth is just relative, that there's no such thing as establishing the truth of anything. Your truth, my truth, we're all entitled to our own truths. That's pernicious, it's attractive to many people, and it is used to exploit people in all sorts of nefarious ways. The truth really does matter.

The truth often does sound unconvincing.

I like to point out that people very often confuse the idea that truth is subjective with the fact that truth is perishable.

If absolute truth belongs to anyone in this world, it certainly does not belong to the man or party that claims to possess it.

There is always a divergence between our perception and what actually exists.

The average man does not get pleasure out of an idea because he thinks it is true; he thinks it is true because he gets pleasure out of it.

Nothing is absolute any longer. There is a choice of beliefs and a choice of truths to go with them. If you choose not to choose then there is no truth at all. There are only points of view.

No one individual can tell the truth.

One person's magical thinking is another person's cynicism.

Times are you say a person's b'liefs ain't true, they think you're sayin' their lifes ain't true an' their truth ain't true.

Does the madman know he is mad? Or are the madmen those who insist o. Convincing him of his unreason in order to safeguard their own idea of reality?

Most of the time in our world, truth is just opinion.