Truth-telling Quotes

Above all, I would teach him to tell the truth. Truth-telling, I have found, is the key to responsible citizenship. The thousands of criminals I have seen in 40 years of law enforcement have had one thing in common: Every single one was a liar. (J. Edgar Hoover)
Pretty much all the honest truth-telling there is in the world is done by children. View quote
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
Isn't it really, really offensive that our president is simply not telling us the truth about what's happening in Iraq? For me, that was one of the most offensive things about the entire convention. There was no truth-telling there. It was all a complete masquerade. Both about Iraq and about the domestic economy... The problem is not that the people think the Democratic Party is not sufficiently hawkish; it's the problem that they are not sufficiently bold and sufficiently visionary. They need to go back to Bobby Kennedy and 1968. That was the last time that a Democrat truly inspired red states and blue states and everybody and the millions of people out there. View quote
Arianna Huffington
Open, honest, truth-telling individuals value privacy. We all need spaces where we can be alone with thoughts and feelings - where we can experience healthy psychological autonomy and can choose to share when we want to. View quote
Bell hooks
I haven't heard anybody on this stage who has talked about American foreign policy in Latin America... There is an injustice that continues to form a toxicity underneath the surface, an emotional turbulence, people heal when there's some deep truth-telling. View quote
Marianne Williamson
Few of the virtues are really useful. Fidelity leads to lost opportunity, truth-telling to injured feelings, charity to additional solicitations. The least productive, and possibly the most overrated, is faith. The faithful deny reason, close their minds to the evidence of their senses, and remain unfailingly optimistic in the face of disaster. They inevitably get just what they deserve. View quote
Jack McDevitt
Of course I have no right whatsoever to write down the truth about my life involving as it naturally does the lives of so many other people, but I do so urged by a necessity of truth-telling, because there is no living soul who knows the complete truth. View quote
Vita Sackville-West
Poetry is the art that is closest to music, standing between music and narrative orality (which can be speechmaking, sermon or theater). Poetry is the voice of what can't be spoken, the mode of truth-telling when meaning needs to rise above or skim below everyday language in shapes not discernible by the ordinary mind. It trumps the rhetoric of politicians. Poetry is prophetic by nature and not bound by time. Because of these qualities poetry carries grief, heartache, ecstasy, celebration, despair, or searing truth more directly than any other literary art form. It is ceremonial in nature. Poetry is a tool for disruption and creation and is necessary for generations of humans to know who they are and who they are becoming in the wave map of history. Without poetry, we lose our way. View quote
Joy Harjo
In an oppressive society the truth-telling nature of literature is of a different order, and sometimes valued more highly than other elements in a work of art. View quote
Julian Barnes
Judaism for me is a sensibility of collective self-questioning and uncomfortable truth-telling. I feel a debt of responsibility to this past. It is why I am Jewish. View quote
Tony Judt
I like children; I like 'em, and I respect 'em. Pretty much all the honest truth-telling there is in the world is done by them. (Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.)