“When in doubt, tell the truth.”
- Mark Twain
“Falsehood is easy, truth so difficult.”
- George Eliot
“Who is more foolish, the child afraid of the dark or the adult afraid of the light?”
- Maurice Freehill
“I know God will not give me anything I can't handle. I just wish He didn't trust me so much.”
- Mother Teresa
“A popular government without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a prologue to a farce or a tragedy, or perhaps both.”
- James Madison
“The United States is unusual among the industrial democracies in the rigidity of the system of ideological control — 'indoctrination,' we might say — 'exercised through the mass media.'”
- Noam Chomsky
“Truth, like gold, is to be obtained not by its growth, but by washing away from it all that is not gold. ”
- Leo Tolstoy
“A newspaper, as I'm sure you know, is a collection of supposedly true stories written down by writers who either saw them happen or talked to people who did. These writers are called journalists, and like telephone operators, butchers, ballerinas, and people who clean up after horses, journalists can sometimes make mistakes.”
- Lemony Snicket
“Knowledge is the antidote to fear.”
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
“What the caterpillar calls the end of the world, the master calls a butterfly.”
- Richard Bach
“Fear is not in the habit of speaking truth; when perfect sincerity is expected, perfect freedom must be allowed; nor has anyone who is apt to be angry when he hears the truth any cause to wonder that he does not hear it.”
- Publius Cornelius Tacitus
“The man who fears no truth has nothing to fear from lies.”
- Thomas Jefferson
“Truthfulness has never been counted among the political virtues, and lies have always been regarded as justifiable tools in political dealings.”
- Hannah Arendt
“If Thomas Edison invented electric light today, Dan Rather would report it on CBS News as: 'Candle making industry threatened.'”
- Newt Gingrich
“Truth has no fear; Untruth shivers at every shadow.”
- Sri Sathya Sai Baba
“In spite of your fear, do what you have to do.”
- Chin-Ning Chu
“Fear grows in darkness; if you think there's a bogeyman around, turn on the light.”
- Dorothy Thompson
“Whenever the people are well-informed, they can be trusted with their own government.”
- Thomas Jefferson
“The man who fears no truths has nothing to fear from lies.”
- Francis Bacon
“A man goes to knowledge as he goes to war, wide awake, with fear, with respect, and with absolute assurance. Going to knowledge or going to war in any other manner is a mistake, and whoever makes it will live to regret his steps.”
- Carlos Castaneda
“Get your facts first, and then you can distort 'em as much as you please.”
- Mark Twain
“Don't waste life in doubts and fears; spend yourself on the work before you, well assured that the right performance of this hour's duties will be the best preparation for the hours and ages that will follow it.”
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
“The world is for thousands a freak show; the images flicker past and vanish; the impressions remain flat and unconnected in the soul. Thus they are easily led by the opinions of others, are content to let their impressions be shuffled and rearranged and evaluated differently.”
- Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
“I learned that courage was not the absence of fear, but the triumph over it. The brave man is not he who does not feel afraid, but he who conquers that fear.”
- Nelson Mandela
“We are taught to understand, correctly, that courage is not the absence of fear, but the capacity for action despite our fears.”
- John McCain
“You can conquer almost any fear if you will only make up your mind to do so. For remember, fear doesn't exist anywhere except in the mind.”
- Dale Carnegie
“Courage is a special kind of knowledge: the knowledge of how to fear what ought to be feared and how not to fear what ought no to be feared.”
- David Ben-Gurion
“Fear is the path to the dark side. Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering.”
- Yoda
“The only sure bulwark of continuing liberty is a government strong enough to protect the interests of the people, and a people strong enough and well enough informed to maintain its sovereign control over the government.”
- Franklin D. Roosevelt
“How very little can be done under the spirit of fear. ”
- Florence Nightingale
“Listen to what you know instead of what you fear. ”
- Richard Bach
“To fear to face an issue is to believe the worst is true.”
- Ayn Rand
“A nation that is afraid to let its people judge the truth and falsehood in an open market is a nation that is afraid of its people.”
- John F. Kennedy
“It may well be that our means are fairly limited and our possibilities restricted when it comes to applying pressure on our government. But is this a reason to do nothing? Despair is nor an answer. Neither is resignation. Resignation only leads to indifference, which is not merely a sin but a punishment.”
- Elie Wiesel
“It would be difficult to dispel ignorance unless there is freedom to pursue the truth unfettered by fear. With so close a relationship between fear and corruption it is little wonder that in any society where fear is rife corruption in all forms becomes deeply entrenched.”
- Aung San Suu Kyi
“Fear is the main source of superstition, and one of the main sources of cruelty. To conquer fear is the beginning of wisdom, in the pursuit of truth as in the endeavour after a worthy manner of life.”
- Bertrand Russell
“If it's called the USA Today, why is all the news from yesterday? BAM. Busted!”
- Stephen Colbert
“Nothing in life is to be feared. It is only to be understood.”
- Marie Curie
“When even one American - who has done nothing wrong -- is forced by fear to shut his mind and close his mouth, then all of Americans are in peril.”
- Harry S. Truman
“A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on.”
- Winston Churchill
“When the people fear their government, there is tyranny; when the government fears the people, there is liberty.”
- Thomas Jefferson
“I do not mean to be the slightest bit critical of TV newspeople, who do a superb job, considering that they operate under severe time constraints and have the intellectual depth of hamsters. But TV news can only present the 'bare bones' of a story; it takes a newspaper, with its capability to present vast amounts of information, to render the story truly boring.”
- Dave Barry
“The truth is more important than the facts.”
- Frank Lloyd Wright
“Truth is tough. It will not break, like a bubble, at a touch, nay, you may kick it all about all day like a football, and it will be round and full at evening.”
- Oliver Wendell Holmes
“For my part, whatever anguish of spirit it may cost, I am willing to know the whole truth; to know the worst and provide for it.”
- Patrick Henry
“It is a puzzling thing. The truth knocks on the door and you say, 'Go away, I'm looking for the truth,' and so it goes away. Puzzling.”
- Robert M. Pirsig
“It is error alone which needs the support of government. Truth can stand by itself.”
- Thomas Jefferson
“When I tell any truth, it is not for the sake of convincing those who do not know it, but for the sake of defending those that do.”
- William Blake
“If I had my choice I would kill every reporter in the world, but I am sure we would be getting reports from Hell before breakfast.”
- William Tecumseh Sherman
“A nation of sheep will beget a government of wolves.”
- Edward R. Murrow
“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.”
- Joseph Goebbels
“Newspapers are unable, seemingly, to discriminate between a bicycle accident and the collapse of civilisation.”
- George Bernard Shaw
“The truth is found when men are free to pursue it.”
- Franklin D. Roosevelt
“Hastiness and superficiality are the psychic diseases of the twentieth century, and more than anywhere else this disease is reflected in the press.”
- Alexander Solzhenitsyn
“I am a firm believer in the people. If given the truth, they can be depended upon to meet any national crisis. The great point is to bring them the real facts.”
- Abraham Lincoln
“A wave of panic passed over the vessel, and these rough and hardy men, who feared no mortal foe, shook with terror at the shadows of their own minds.”
- Arthur Conan Doyle
“Fear cannot be banished, but it can be calm and without panic; it can be mitigated by reason and evaluation.”
- Vannevar Bush
“Cowardice, as distinguished from panic, is almost always simply a lack of ability to suspend the functioning of the imagination.”
- Ernest Hemingway
“Courage is not the absence of fear but the ability to carry on with dignity in spite of it.”
- Scott Turow
“The media's the most powerful entity on earth. They have the power to make the innocent guilty and to make the guilty innocent, and that's power. Because they control the minds of the masses.”
- Malcom X
“If you once forfeit the confidence of your fellow citizens, you can never regain their respect and esteem. It is true that you may fool all of the people some of the time; you can even fool some of the people all of the time; but you can't fool all of the people all of the time.”
- Abraham Lincoln
“We hang the petty thieves and appoint the great ones to public office.”
- Aesop
“Media is just a word that has come to mean bad journalism.”
- Graham Greene
“By definition, a government has no conscience. Sometimes it has a policy, but nothing more.”
- Albert Camus
“Those who seek absolute power, even though they seek it to do what they regard as good, are simply demanding the right to enforce their own version of heaven on earth. And let me remind you, they are the very ones who always create the most hellish tyrannies. Absolute power does corrupt, and those who seek it must be suspect and must be opposed.”
- Barry Goldwater
“We are not afraid to entrust the American people with unpleasant facts, foreign ideas, alien philosophies, and competitive values. For a nation that is afraid to let its people judge the truth and falsehood in an open market is a nation that is afraid of its people.”
- John F. Kennedy
“I know of no safe repository of the ultimate power of society but people. And if we think them not enlightened enough, the remedy is not to take the power from them, but to inform them by education.”
- Thomas Jefferson
“Where large sums of money are concerned, it is advisable to trust nobody.”
- Agatha Christie
“Love all, trust a few.”
- William Shakespeare
“One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we've been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. The bamboozle has captured us. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.”
- Carl Sagan
“All of us who professionally use the mass media are the shapers of society. We can vulgerize that society. We can brutalize it. Or we can help lift it onto a higher level.”
- William Bernbach
“I'm not upset that you lied to me, I'm upset that from now on I can't believe you.”
- Friedrich Nietzsche
“If one morning I walked on top of the water across the Potomac River, the headline that afternoon would read: 'President Can't Swim.'”
- Lyndon B. Johnson
“Lies are often much more plausible, more appealing to reason, than reality, since the liar has the great advantage of knowing beforehand what the audience wishes or expects to hear.”
- Hannah Arendt
“The public have an insatiable curiosity to know everything. Except what is worth knowing. Journalism, conscious of this, and having tradesman-like habits, supplies their demands.”
- Oscar Wilde
“When in doubt, tell the truth.”
- Mark Twain
“When distant and unfamiliar and complex things are communicated to great masses of people, the truth suffers a considerable and often a radical distortion. The complex is made over into the simple, the hypothetical into the dogmatic, and the relative into an absolute.”
- Walter Lippmann
“If such a plague came today, killing a similar fraction of the U.S. population, 1.5 million Americans would die, which is more than the number felled in a single year by heart disease, cancers, strokes, chronic pulmonary disease, AIDS, and Alzheimer’s disease combined.”
- Gina Kolata
