A Quote by Robert Green Ingersoll

There are times when a falsehood well told bridges over quite a difficulty, but in the long run, you had better tell the truth, even if you swim the creek. — © Robert Green Ingersoll
There are times when a falsehood well told bridges over quite a difficulty, but in the long run, you had better tell the truth, even if you swim the creek.
There is no doubt that truth is to falsehood as light is to darkness; and so excellent a thing is truth that even when it touches humble and lowly matters, it still incomparably exceeds the uncertainty and falsehood in which great and elevated discourses are clothed; because even if falsehood be the fifth element of our minds, notwithstanding this, truth is the supreme nourishment of the higher intellects.
In the long run, the most unpleasant truth is a safer companion than a pleasant falsehood.
Bridges are burning all around us; bridges to responses that might have mitigated the already brutal (and just beginning) ravages of Peak Oil; bridges to reduce the likelihood of war and famine; bridges to avoid our selectively chosen suicide; bridges to change at least a part of energy infrastructure and consumption; bridges to becoming something better than we are or have been; bridges to non-violence. Those bridges are effectively gone.
If you told the truth, that was all well and good and if you told the un-truth, well, that's still well and good. Folk songs had taught me that.
What do you first do when you learn to swim? You make mistakes, do you not? And what happens? You make other mistakes, and when you have made all the mistakes you possibly can without drowning - and some of them many times over - what do you find? That you can swim? Well - life is just the same as learning to swim! Do not be afraid of making mistakes, for there is no other way of learning how to live!
A teacher told my mother that I would never become successful, which illustrates the difficulty of long-run forecasting on inadequate data.
It is better to be divided by truth than to be united in error. It is better to speak the truth that hurts and then heals, than falsehood that comforts and then kills. It is better to be hated for telling the truth than to be loved for telling a lie. It is better to stand alone with the truth, than to be wrong with a multitude. It is better to ultimately succeed with the truth than to temporarily succeed with a lie. There is only one Gospel.
Strange times are these, in which we live, forsooth ; When young and old are taught in Falsehood's school:– And the man who dares to tell the truth, Is called at once a lunatic and fool.
I had supposed until that time that it was quite common for parents to love their children, but the war persuaded me that it is a rare exception. I had supposed that most people liked money better than almost anything else, but I discovered that they liked destruction even better. I had supposed that intellectuals frequently loved truth, but I found here again that not ten per cent of them prefer truth to popularity.
As a farm girl, even when I was quite young, I had my 'farm chores' - but I had time also to be alone, to explore the fields, woods and creek side. And to read.
What do you know about yourself? What are your stories? The ones you tell yourself, and the ones told by others. All of us begin somewhere. Though I suppose the truth is that we begin more than once; we begin many times. Over and over, we start our own tales, compose our own stories, whether our lives are short or long. Until at last all our beginnings come down to just one end, and the tale of who we are is done.
Truth is so obscure in these times, and falsehood so established, that, unless we love the truth, we cannot know it.
I had a spate of being run over between the ages of 11 and 13. I was quite a rambunctious child, I had a little moped I used to ride illegally. I got hit by cars three times because I was a very day-dreamy kid.
I was told that I had very likely been clinically depressed for a long, long time, probably since I was 15, or even 14. It explained, to me at least, a lot of my behaviour over the years.
Truth and falsehood are opposed; but truth is the norm not of truth only but of falsehood also.
Lies don't fix things. They don't even make things easier, at least not in the long run. Best to tell the truth and then clean up an honest mess.
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