Quotes & Sayings About Half Truths

Any education that matters is liberal. All the saving truths, all the healing graces that distinguish a good education from a bad one or a full education from a half empty one are contained in that word. — Alan K. Simpson

We make no apology then for raising our voices loud to a world that is ripening in sin the lord has said, Say nothing but repentance unto this generation; The adversary is subtle, cunning, he knows that he cannot induce good men and women immediately to do major evils so he moves slyly, whispering half truths until he has his intended victims following him finally he clamps his chains upon them and fetters them tight, and then he laughs at their discomfiture and their misery. — Spencer W. Kimball

Guys, I don't want to tell you half-truths, unless they're completely accurate. — Alain Vigneault

The habit of literature [is] the best defense against believing the half-truths of ideologues and the lies of demagogues. — Ursula K. Le Guin

It is notorious that we speak no more than half-truths in our ordinary conversation, and even a soliloquy is likely to be affected by the apprehension that walls have ears. — Eric Linklater

The night is full of shadows and half truths — Mark Jackson

It's not enough to be able to lie with a straight face; anybody with enough gall to raise on a busted flush can do that. The first way to lie artistically is to tell the truth - but not all of it. The second way involves telling the truth, too, but is harder: Tell the exact truth and maybe all of it ... but tell it so unconvincingly that your listener is sure you are lying. — Robert A. Heinlein

We must not always try to plumb the depths of the human heart; the truths it contains are among those that are best seen in half-light or in perspective. — Francois-Rene De Chateaubriand

Half-truths are worth more than outright lies. — George R R Martin

Political truths are like colors in the rainbow, they may be true, except like the color purple which is created in the mind, however they are not THE WHOLE TRUTH, which is like LIGHT, colorless and yet all colors, seen and unseen. — Caesar J. B. Squitti

Once you take to the habit of deception, every new lie comes that much easier. Though to me it wasn't so much lies as a matter of judicious editing. We all inevitable present a version of ourselves that is a collection of half-truths and exclusions. The way I saw it, the truth was too complicated, whereas the well-chosen lie would put everyone's mind at ease. — Caroline Kettlewell

That 'change makes us uncomfortable' is now one of the most widely promoted, widely accepted, and under-considered half-truths around. [I]t is not change by itself that makes us uncomfortable; it is not even change that involves taking on something very difficult. Rather, it is change that leaves us feeling defenseless before the dangers we 'know' to be present that causes us anxiety. — Robert Kegan

Well, Brekker, it's obvious you only deal in half-truths and outright lies, so you're clearly the man for the job. — Leigh Bardugo

I knew I had to keep him to myself, as I'd slowly begun to keep everything. We had secrets now, truths and half-truths, that kept her always at arm's length, behind a closed door, miles away. — Sarah Dessen

The insincerity of man-all men are liars, partial or hiders of facts, half tellers of truths, shirks, moral sneaks. When a merely honest man appears he is a comet-his fame is eternal-needs no genius, no talent-mere honesty — Mark Twain

Moderation is based on the idea that things do not fit neatly together. Politics is likely to be a competition between legitimate opposing interests. Philosophy is likely to be a tension between competing half truths. A personality is likely to be a battleground of valuable but incompatible traits. — David Brooks

When all is done, you must look in your own heart to know the truth. It lies at some middle depth, half-truths above, half-truths below. Even my truth, what I tell you know, is colored to fit my vision. Find your own truths as best you can, only remember that few are courageous enough to tell a tale of which they are not the hero. — Alida Van Gores

The misdeeds of ordinary men can be buried with them, and their lives described in half-truths that are really half-lies. But not a public man. Particularly not this one. — Anna Quindlen

Half-truths can be as deceptive as outright lies. — David Limbaugh

The truths that matter most to us come always half spoken. — Baltasar Gracian

If you have the courage to be honest with everyone, including yourself, you may hurt a few people's feelings, but they will forever value your opinion more than your half truths. — Steven Aitchison

Many philosophers in the second half of the 20th century really seemed to think that they were laying the foundations for science by laying down the conceptual (necessary) truths. — Patricia Churchland

Rumors had their own classic epidemiology. Each started with a single germinating event. Information spread from that point, mutating and interbreeding - a conical mass of threads, expanding into the future from the apex of their common birthplace. Eventually, of course, they'd wither and die; the cone would simply dissipate at its wide end, its permutations senescent and exhausted.
There were exceptions, of course. Every now and then a single thread persisted, grew thick and gnarled and unkillable: conspiracy theories and urban legends, the hooks embedded in popular songs, the comforting Easter-bunny lies of religious doctrine. These were the memes: viral concepts, infections of conscious thought. Some flared and died like mayflies. Others lasted a thousand years or more, tricked billions into the endless propagation of parasitic half-truths. — Peter Watts

Sure, the job of high school teachers is not to tear down students' self-esteem. But it's certainly not to inflate students' sense of self-worth with a bunch of unearned compliments and half-truths. — LZ Granderson

As far as Nicholas was concerned, half-truths only added up to a whole lie. Glancing — Alexandra Bracken

You don't need a digital David Petraeus or a President Bush avatar to distract you from the truth. You don't need to wait decades to have disinformation beamed into your head. You just need a constant stream of misleading information, half truths, and fictions to be promoted, pushed, and peddled until they are accepted as fact. — Nick Turse

How treacherous history is! Half-truths, ignorance, deceptions, false trails, errors and lies, and buried somewhere in between all of that, the truth, in which it is easy to lose faith, of which it is consequently easy to say, it's a chimera, there's no such thing, everything is relative, one man's absolute belief is another man's fairy tale; but about which we insist, we insist most emphatically, that it is too important an idea to give up to the relativity merchants. — Salman Rushdie

Politics is likely to be a competition between legitimate opposing interests. Philosophy is likely to be a tension between competing half-truths. A personality is likely to be a battleground of valuable but — David Brooks

We're all spies. What do we have if not our rumors, our half-truths, our fragments taken out of context? — Joakim Zander

Half-truths only added up to a whole lie. — Alexandra Bracken

One of the eternal truths of life - People who ask "do you know who I am?" will always, given half a chance, tell you. — Christina Engela

People still ask questions and hope the answers will be what they think they already know. They need to pray this prayer by an anonymous believer: From the cowardice that shrinks from new truths, From the laziness that is content with half-truths, From the arrogance that thinks it knows all truth, O God of truth, deliver us! — Warren W. Wiersbe

Truth is like a double edged sword.

Truth, as in the colors of the rainbow, are truths, not to be confused with THE TRUTH, which is like LIGHT, all colors and no single color.

The Truth is like a tree, with all its fruit, while truths are like the fruit on the tree, part of the whole; parts of The Truth, half-truths.

Truth can be true, yet it can also lie.

So the question is does truth lead to THE TRUTH, or do truths lead us to a lie ? To see the difference is the key to the gates of Eden. — Caesar J. B. Squitti

Common sense, the half-truths of a deceitful society, is honored as the honest truths of a frank world. — Russell Jacoby

Two half truths do not make a truth. — Arthur Koestler

Half-truths can be more pernicious than outright falsehoods. — Wendy Lesser

One reason nearly half my books are for children is the glorious fact that the minds of children are still open to the living word; in the child, nightside and sunside are not yet separated; fantasy contains truths which cannot be stated in terms of proof. — Madeleine L'Engle

The whole truth is this: the time of the half-life is over. Done.
There's no more time for half-hearted living, half-truths and dividing life into neat compartments. We have work to do here. It begins from the inside-out, with a commitment to see ourselves as whole and to embrace the fullness of who we are and who we are becoming. — Dawn Richerson

The problem with half-truths, I'm discovering, is that they are also half-lies. — Kimberly Belle

It is important to communicate to children about what we are going through. We often speak in half truths. We don't frame the truth or explain our experience in terms they can understand. We need to take time to do this. What has to happen is that more people have to get involved with more children. Focus energy on the child. Children are raising themselves these days in all sorts of strange ways. — James Redfield

The half-truths have been in fashion again. — Kristian Goldmund Aumann

I was worked like a jackass for the worst part of my childhood, and offered up to climate and predator and vice, and introduced to solitude, and braced against hope, and dangled before the Lord our God, and schooled in the subtle truths and blatant lies of a half life in the American countryside, all because my parents did not trust that I would mature to their specifications in town. — Ben Metcalf

Lies and half-truths fall like snow, covering the things that I remember, the things I saw. A landscape, unrecognizable after a snowfall; that is that she has made of my life. — Neil Gaiman

There is little hope for us until we become tough-minded enough to break loose from the shackles of prejudice, half-truths, and downright ignorance. The shape of the world today does not permit us the luxury of soft mindedness. A nation or a civilization that continues to produce soft minded men purchases its own spiritual death on an installment plan. — Martin Luther King Jr.

The ancient sages never put their teachings in systematic form. They spoke in paradoxes, for they were afraid of uttering half-truths. They began by talking like fools and ended up making their hearers wise. — Okakura Kakuzo

Thus the story of the facts has to reckon with filters, deferments, partial truths, half lies: from it comes an arduous measurement of time passed that is based completely on the unreliable measuring device of words. — Elena Ferrante

I watched Hugo Barrington when he gave his evidence. The same self-confidence, the same arrogance, the same half-truths spouted convincingly to the jury, just as he'd whispered them to me in the privacy of the bedroom. — Jeffrey Archer

To think out a problem is not unlike drawing a caricature. You have to exaggerate the salient point and leave out that which is not typical. "To illustrate a principle ," says Bagehot , "you must exaggerate much and you must omit much." As to the quantity of absolute truth in a thought : it seems to me the more comprehensive and unobjectionable a thought becomes, the more clumsy and unexciting it gets. I like half-truths of a certain kind they are interesting and they stimulate. — Eric Hoffer

On the eve of the election last month my wife Judith and I were driving home late in the afternoon and turned on the radio for the traffic and weather. What we instantly got was a freak show of political pornography : lies , distortions, and half-truths half-truths being perhaps the blackest of all lies. They paraded before us as informed opinion. — Bill Moyers

Still photographs are the most powerful weapon in the world. People believe them, but photographs do lie, even without manipulation. They are only half-truths. — Eddie Adams

Half truths are full lies. — Tionne Rogers

they seem unable to retain this very simple truth for long, although they have been told again and again, and this is because of another and most powerful feature of their thinking, which is that anything they are told is distorted to fit their own particular personal or group bias and then added, like another pebble to the pile of the half-truths they already cherish. — Doris Lessing

It is possible of course that there are no more real men here, on his ball of half-truths, the earth. — Donald Barthelme

Two left-handed gloves don't make a pair. Two half-truths don't make a truth. — Multatuli

But now, where the spirit of the Western nationalism prevails, the whole people is being taught from boyhood to foster hatreds and ambitions by all kinds of means - by the manufacture of half-truths and untruths in history, by persistent misrepresentation of other races and the culture of unfavourable sentiments towards them, by setting up memorials of events, very often false, which for the sake of humanity should be speedily forgotten, thus continually brewing evil menace towards neighbours and nations other than their own. This is poisoning the very fountainhead of humanity. It is discrediting the ideals, which were born of the lives of men who were our greatest and best. It is holding up gigantic selfishness as the one universal religion for all nations of the world. — Rabindranath Tagore

Well, I've had my fun; I've had it, he thought, looking up at the swinging baskets of pale geraniums. And it was smashed to atoms - his fun, for it was half made up, as he knew very well; invented, this escapade with the girl; made up, as one makes up the better part of life, he thought - making onself up; making her up; creating an exquisite amusement, and something more. But odd it was, and quite true; all this one could never share - it smashed to atoms. — Virginia Woolf

The truth is that science started its modern career by taking over ideas derived from the weakest side of the philosophies of Aristotle's successors. In some respects it was a happy choice. It enabled the knowledge of the seventeenth century to be formularised so far as physics and chemistry were concerned, with a completeness which has lasted to the present time. But the progress of biology and psychology has probably been checked by the uncritical assumption of half-truths. If science is not to degenerate into a medley of ad hoc hypothesis, it must become philosophical and must enter upon a thorough criticism of its own foundations. — Alfred North Whitehead

God hates the LUKEWARM GOSPEL OF HALF-TRUTHS that is now spreading over the Globe. This gospel says, 'Just believe in Jesus and you'll be Saved. There's nothing more to it.' It ignores the Whole Counsel of God, which speaks of Repenting from former Sins, of Taking up your Cross, of being conformed to the Image of Christ by the refining work of the Holy Spirit. It is totally silent about the Reality of Hell and an After-Death Judgment. — David Wilkerson

In World War One it was the propaganda of our side that first made "propaganda" so opprobrious a term. Fouled by close association with "the Hun," the word did not regain its innocence - not even when the Allied propaganda used to tar "the Hun" had been belatedly exposed to the American and British people. Indeed, as they learned more and more about the outright lies, exaggerations and half-truths used on them by their own governments, both populations came, understandably, to see "propaganda" as a weapon even more perfidious than they had thought when they had not perceived themselves as its real target. Thus did the word's demonic implications only harden through the Twenties, in spite of certain random efforts to redeem it. — Edward L. Bernays

One of the greatest challenge facing young people today, is the
large scale availability of half truth's and manipulated facts — Oche Otorkpa

Half-truths are like half a brick - they can be thrown farther. — Hyman Rickover

Once one has attained a high level of success at any pursuit and especially an unorthodox pursuit like rowing, one develops a number of generally self-congratulatory half-truths to explain how it happened that he ascended to that particular pinnacle. Often because original motivations don't seem to have much in common with the eventual success, the real and rationalized motivations are difficult to separate. — Stefan Kieszling

To persuade thinking persons in Eastern Europe that Central American Marxists - the Sandinistas, the guerillas in El Salvador - are in absurd and tragic error is not difficult. Poles and Czechs and Hungarians can hardly believe, after what they experienced under socialism, that other human beings would fall for the same bundle of lies, half-truths, and distortions. Sadly, however, illusion is often sweeter to human taste than reality. The last marxist in the world will probably be an American nun. — Michael Novak

How do you generalize? War is hell, but that's not the half of it, because war is also mystery and terror and adventure and courage and discovery and holiness and pity and despair and longing and love. War is nasty; war is fun. War is thrilling; war is drudgery. War makes you a man; war makes you dead. The truths are contradictory. — Tim O'Brien

It's no mystery why many of us in the media can't get enough of the fabricators Jayson Blair and Stephen Glass, the latter of whom concocted more than a score of bogus feature stories for the New Republic (and who wrote for other magazines, including this one, once) in the mid-1990s. Anyone
journalist, student, academic
who has ever stared at a blank screen, their brains grinding emptiness, and thought, How can I fill this hole? knows that in those desperate moments before a deadline, almost anyone can do almost anything: make stuff up, plagiarize, scribble senseless half-truths. — David Edelstein

The value of a work of art cannot ultimately turn on the more or less of its subservience to ideology; for painting can be grandly subservient to the half-truths of the moment, doggedly servile, and yet be no less intense. — T.J. Clark

One goes to Nature only for hints and half-truths. Her facts are crude until you have absorbed them or translated them ... It is not so much what we see as what the thing seen suggests. — John Burroughs

Everyone acted like they knew so much about the war. But none of them really knew anything besides what they had learned through Internet searches or shady half-truths political pundits spouted from the comfort of their news desks. Nothing could ever be flushed out because nobody bothered to ask the troops or look at both sides of the story. — Clint Van Winkle

Half-truths are the devil's IOUs. — Sarah Ban Breathnach

An aphorism is never exactly true; it is either a half-truth or one-and-a-half truths. — Karl Kraus

He'd listened to enough half-truths and outright lies from the outlaws he'd collected bounties on not to notice the slight hesitations in her speech or the exaggerated casualness of her posture. The woman was up to something. Heeding — Karen Witemeyer

Everyone knows that a lot of memoirs have made-up scenes; it's obvious. And everyone knows that half the time at least fictions contain literal autobiographical truths. So how do we decide what's what, and does it even matter? — Lauren Slater

Sometimes the hardest thing about the truth is putting down the misassumptions, falsehoods, and half-truths that stand between it and you. Sometimes that's the last thing that anybody wants to do. And sometimes, it's the only thing we can do. — Mira Grant

Just as Socrates felt that it was necessary to create a tension in the mind so that individuals could rise from the bondage of myths and half-truths to the unfettered realm of creative analysis and objective appraisal, so must we see the need for nonviolent gadflies to create the kind of tension in society that will help men rise from the dark depths of prejudice and racism to majestic heights of understanding and brotherhood. — Martin Luther King Jr.

We may be sure that the characteristic blindness of the twentieth century - the blindness about which posterity will ask, "But how could they have thought that?" - lies where we have never suspected it ... None of us can fully escape this blindness, but we shall certainly increase it, and weaken our guard against it, if we read only modern books. Where they are true they will give us truths which we half knew already. Where they are false they will aggravate the error with which we are already dangerously ill. The only palliative is to keep the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds, and this can be done only by reading old books. — C.S. Lewis

Maxims are sharp-edged half-truths. — Mason Cooley

There is a terrible blindness in the love that wants only to accommodate. It's not only to do with omissions and half-truths. It implants a lack of being in the speaker and robs the self of an identity without which it is impossible for one to grow close to another. — Alexander Theroux

In a world of full of manipulation, half-truths and lies, the conspiracy theory is often a safer bet than the official story. — Gary Hopkins

Science is always simple and always profound. It is only the half-truths that are dangerous. — George Bernard Shaw

There are no whole truths; all truths are half-truths. It is trying to treat them as whole truths that plays the devil. — Alfred North Whitehead

The polls demonstrate that 50 percent of Americans who get their news from TV think Saddam Hussein was behind the Twin Towers attack. Man, have they got ways for getting half-truths out right away now, thanks to TV! I think TV is a calamity in a democracy. — Kurt Vonnegut

The truth is always a compound of two half- truths, and you never reach it, because there is always something more to say. — Tom Stoppard

Those who don't read the newspapers are better off than those who do insofar as those who know nothing are better off than those whose heads are filled with half-truths and lies. — Thomas Jefferson

Lying is the misuse of language. We know that. We need to remember that it works the other way round too. Even with the best intentions, language misused, language used stupidly, carelessly, brutally, language used wrongly, breeds lies, half-truths, confusion. In that sense you can say that grammar is morality. And it is in that sense that I say a writer's first duty is to use language well. — Ursula K. Le Guin

Wise books For half the truths they hold are honored tombs. — George Eliot

We are constantly - in order to cope with painful realities - shuffling through third-rate, half-remembered fantasies taken from movies, from TV, from people we admire. We do this individually, we do it collectively - we tell stories to escape our most painful truths. — Joshua Oppenheimer

Aristotle discovered all the half-truths which were necessary to the creation of science. — Alfred North Whitehead

The Truth is different than human truths; they are like LIGHT.
Truths are like a color, absolute and true, while THE TRUTH is all colors and still colorless; the duality of Truth. — Caesar J. B. Squitti

A true fear of God makes us respect more what God requires and commands than what our corrupt heart desires and suggests. It subdues or unruly passions, and brings them within the compass of duty. It makes us deny ourselves and our own desires, and, though through the corruption of our nature and inborn pride we are loath to submit, yet God's fear will bring down that proud mind and make us humble and gentle. It will keep those who are in authority from tyranny, cruelty, and too much severity, and it will keep those who are under subjection from giving half-truths, deceit, and conspiracies. — William Gouge

Partial truths or half-truths are often more insidious than total falsehoods. — Samuel P. Huntington

He lied all the time, about everything. Even when he didn't need to, even when there was no point. ... Tom's whole life was constructed on lies - falsehoods and half-truths told to make him look better, stronger, more interesting than he was. And I bought them. I fell for them all. ... I wonder whether [I] would have loved the weaker, flawed, unembellished version. I think I would. I would have forgiven his mistakes and his failures. I have committed enough of my own. — Paula Hawkins

In a Time
In a time of secret wooing
Today prepares tomorrow's ruin
Left knows not what right is doing
My heart is torn asunder.
In a time of furtive sighs
Sweet hellos and sad goodbyes
Half-truths told and entire lies
My conscience echoes thunder
In a time when kingdoms come
Joy is brief as summer's fun
Happiness, its race has run
Then pain stalks in to plunder. — Maya Angelou

Many people, after spending a long weekend being stealthily seduced by this grand dame of the South, mistakenly think that they have gotten to know her: they believe (in error) that after a long stroll amongst the rustling palmettoes and gas lamps, a couple of sumptuous meals, and a tour or two, that they have discovered everything there is to know about this seemingly genteel, elegant city. But like any great seductress, Charleston presents a careful veneer of half-truths and outright fabrications, and it lets you, the intended conquest, fill in many of the blanks. Seduction, after all, is not true love, nor is it a gentle act. She whispers stories spun from sugar about pirates and patriots and rebels, about plantations and traditions and manners and yes, even ghosts; but the entire time she is guarded about the real story. Few tourists ever hear the truth, because at the dark heart of Charleston is a winding tale of violence, tragedy and, most of all, sin. — James Caskey

Half truths were a wonderful way to inspire credibility. — David Baldacci

The truth, 'stop violence against women' is a truth that is flawed, because it ignores the many forms of abuses of women, and then totally ignores men, children and the unborn.
Why the unborn ?
Well today, more and more unborn women of tomorrow are having their heart-beats terminated today, because they are female. — Caesar J. B. Squitti

Quite half of the human race was in tears. — Marcel Proust

... in the latter half of the twentieth century, postmodernism upended everything. Universal truths were no longer accepted. "Truth" (postmodernism loves quotation marks) was instead a social construct that depended heavily on cultural context. Nothing was either true or false, but was instead open to interpretation. — Gudjon Bergmann

There was a distinction between lying and telling half-truths, but it was a very narrow one. — Alexander McCall Smith

Two half-truths do not make a truth, and two half- cultures do not make a culture — Arthur Koestler

A half-truth is even more dangerous than a lie. A lie, you can detect at some stage, but half a truth is sure to mislead you for long. — Anurag Shourie