Truth Quotes

“Truth threatens peace. Those who think they possess it tend to turn into victimizers of the rest, like all the other bullies convinced of the superiority of their own race or class or caste or blood or wisdom.”
― Felipe Fernández-Armesto, Truth: A History and a Guide for the Perplexed

“sphere. ‘You can only find truth with logic,’ as Chesterton said, ‘if you have already found truth without it.”
― Felipe Fernández-Armesto, Truth: A History and a Guide for the Perplexed

“Yet we keep returning to reason precisely because it occupies the middle place; it is the revisited point on the swing of the pendulum between scepticism and enthusiasm.”
― Felipe Fernández-Armesto, Truth: A History and a Guide for the Perplexed

“Authoritative approval is essential, for, to the believer, the value of the truth you are told is its claim to objectivity.”
― Felipe Fernández-Armesto, Truth: A History and a Guide for the Perplexed

“waking share one common world but when asleep each man turns away to a private one’. His”
― Felipe Fernández-Armesto, Truth: A History and a Guide for the Perplexed

“Human intellects make sense of things and, if anything, err on the side of coherence. Geniuses of my acquaintance, who almost seem clever enough to make sense of the world if they so wished, are more likely to accept it as a muddle than the common man who invests it with a transcendent character of its own or recognizes it as filled with divine purpose in which nothing is out of place. Pluralism and chaos are harder to grasp – harder, perhaps, to understand and certainly to accept – than monism and order. For a whole society to accept an agreed world-picture as senseless, random and intractable, people seem to need a lot of collective disillusionment, accumulated and transmitted over many generations (see here). Moral and cognitive ambiguities are luxuries we allow ourselves which most of our forebears eschewed. Whether from an historical angle of approach, along which reconstruction is attempted of the thought of the earliest sages we know about, or from an anthropological direction, lined with examples from primitive societies which survived long enough to be scrutinized, early world-pictures seem remarkably systematic, like the ‘dreamtime’ of Australian aboriginals, in which the inseparable tissue of all the universe was spun. The ambitions these images embody betray the inclusive and comprehensive minds which made them. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries ethnographers’ fieldwork seemed ever to be stumbling on confusedly atomized world-pictures, shared by people who reached for understanding with frenzied clutchings but no overall grasp. This was because anthropologists of the time had a progressive model of human development in mind: animism preceded polytheism, which preceded monotheism; magic preceded religion, which preceded science. Confusion came first and categories, schemes and systems came later. People of the forest saw trees before they inferred wood. Coherence, it was assumed, is constructed late in human history. It now seems that the opposite is true. Coherence-seeking is one of those innate characteristics that make human thought human. No people known to modern anthropology is without it. ‘One of the deepest human desires’, Isaiah Berlin has said, ‘is to find a unitary pattern in which the whole of experience is symmetrically ordered.’ Two kinds of coherence seem to come easily to primitive cosmogonists: they can be called, for convenience, binarism and monism. (For binarism, ‘dualism’ is a traditional name, but this word is now used with so many mutually incompatible meanings that it is less confusing to coin a new term.) Binarism envisages a cosmos regulated by the flow or balance between two conflicting or complementary principles. Monism imagines an indivisibly cohesive universe; the first a twofold, the second an unfolded cosmos. Equilibrium and cohesion are the characteristics of the world in what we take to be its oldest descriptions: equilibrium is the nature of a binarist description, cohesion of a monist one. Truth, for societies which rely on these characterizations for their understanding of the world, is what contributes to equilibrium or participates in cohesion. They”
― Felipe Fernández-Armesto, Truth: A History and a Guide for the Perplexed

“Hard as it is for us to escape the effects of our own feelings, nobody seems to have difficulty in rejecting the feelings of others as merely subjective and vulnerable to interference from the demons of self-deception and self-delusion.”
― Felipe Fernández-Armesto, Truth: A History and a Guide for the Perplexed

“Feeling, according to the Winnebag, is the prime mover of the universe, as thought was in the opinion of some ancient Greek sages. Indeed, feeling and thought can be defined in terms of one another. Feeling is thought unformulated; thought is feeling expressed in communicable ways.”
― Felipe Fernández-Armesto, Truth: A History and a Guide for the Perplexed

“We need a history of truth to illuminate the unique predicament of our times and – if possible – help us escape from it. We also need it because truth is fundamental to everything else. Everyone’s attempt to be good – every attempt to construct happy relationships and thriving societies – starts with two questions: How do I tell right from wrong? And how do I tell truth from falsehood?”
― Felipe Fernández-Armesto, Truth: A History and a Guide for the Perplexed

“A modified version of Father Brown’s curse, however, seems to be coming true: when people stop believing in something, they do not believe in nothing; they believe in anything. Crackpot cults”
― Felipe Fernández-Armesto, Truth: A History and a Guide for the Perplexed