Selective Truth Quotes

We swallow greedily any lie that flatters us, but we sip only little by little at a truth we find bitter.

The truth is not for all men, but only for those who seek it.

Maybe honesty is overvalued. What's truly priceless is picking out from a stream of falsehoods the ones you most need to hear.

Power is domination, control, and therefore a very selective form of truth which is a lie.

Letting the facts speak for themselves is an immoral principle when we all know that facts and figures can be selected to prove anything.

So I wasn't lying, exactly. I was just choosing among truths.

I'll see Naomi Wolf on television periodically, I have nothing against her and what she says, but I'll feel that she's a politician, like she's got an agenda to get across and that she doesn't always say what's really true or exactly what she feels.

The best propaganda omits rather than invents

The truth that survives is simply the lie that is pleasantest to believe.

It's unfortunate people can twist and turn things to fit whatever narrative they'd like it to fit.

Truth is for the minority.

We make up any excuse to preserve myths about people we love, but the reverse is also true; if we dislike an individual we adamantly resist changing our opinion, even when somebody offers proof of his decency, because it's vital to have myths about both the gods and devils in our lives.

Yes, I know, it's not the truth, but in a great history little truths can be altered so that the greater truth emerges.

You cannot demand truth, and then select half and throw the inconvenient remainder away.

One of the most untruthful things possible, you know, is a collection of facts, because they can be made to appear so many different ways.

One can shape history as much through the facts one omits as through the facts one includes.

I don't feel the need to share the truth with people that I don't know.

You couldn't always trust the history books. They told a diluted truth, a truth by committee.

People who are most interested in telling the truth about others are generally the least interested in having the truth told about themselves.

It is one of the maladies of our age to profess a frenzied allegiance to truth in unimportant matters, to refuse consistently to face her where graver issues are at stake.

Facts must be manipulated; some must be brightened; others shaded; yet, in the process, they must never lose their integrity.

There’s no way to really preserve a person when they’ve gone and that’s because whatever you write down it’s not the truth, it’s just a story. Stories are all we’re ever left with in our head or on paper: clever narratives put together from selected facts, legends, well edited tall tales with us in the starring roles

Usually we are saying only part of the truth.

Each one writes history according to his convenience.

If you take part of the truth, and try to make that part of the truth, all of the truth, then that part of the truth becomes an untruth.