#️⃣Truth

We judge and punish based on facts, but facts are not truth. Facts are like a buried skeleton uncovered long after death. Truth is fluid. Truth is alive. To know the truth requires understanding, the most difficult human art. It requires seeing all things at once, forward and backward, the way God sees.

The only way you can write the truth is to assume that what you set down will never be read. Not by any other person, and not even by yourself at some later date. Otherwise you begin excusing yourself.

You want the truth, of course. You want me to put two and two together. But two and two doesn’t necessarily get you the truth - The living bird is not its labeled bones.

Truth does not depend on the person who says it. The truth is still the truth even if stated by someone you don’t respect.

History is written by the victorious, the liars, the strongest, the most determined. Truth is found most often in the silence, in the quiet places.

The truth, I discovered, is a tree that grows as a man gains access to experience. A child sees the acorn of his daily life, but a man looks back on the oak.

When you cut pieces from the truth to avoid sounding like a fool, you end up sounding like a moron.

There’s a peculiar dichotomy in the nature of almost anyone who calls himself a historian. Such scholars all piously assure us that they’re telling us the real truth about what really happened, but if you turn any competent historian over and look at his damp underside, you’ll find a storyteller, and you can believe me when I tell you that no storyteller’s ever going to tell a story without a few embellishments. Add to that the fact that we’ve all got assorted political and theological preconceptions that are going to color what we write, and you’ll begin to realize that no history of any event is entirely reliable.

People are stupid; given proper motivation, almost anyone will believe almost anything. Because people are stupid, they will believe a lie because they want to believe it’s true, or because they are afraid it might be true. People’s heads are full of knowledge, facts, and beliefs, and most of it is false, yet they think it true. People are stupid; they can only rarely tell the difference between a lie and the truth, and yet they are confident they can, and so are all the easier to fool?