A Quote by Shelby Foote

I've never known, at least a modern historical instance, where the truth wasn't superior to distortion in every way.

Shelby Foote

Quote Topics

Distortion Every Historical Instance Known Least Modern Never Superior Truth Way

Quote Author

Shelby Foote
American - Novelist
November 17, 1916 - June 27, 2005

But though every created thing is, in this sense, a mystery, the word mystery cannot be applied to moral truth, any more than obscurity can be applied to light. ... Mystery is the antagonist of truth. It is a fog of human invention, that obscures truth, and represents it in distortion. Truth never envelops itself in mystery, and the mystery in which it is at any time enveloped is the work of its antagonist, and never of itself.

Thomas Paine

In the same way that I've no desire to live in earlier historical periods, I never touch historical recipes. Most historical cooking is detestable.

David Starkey

For instance, members of the elite will never allow their children to become musicians normally, because it's - not embarrassing - but it's not done. There's a very famous composer from the '70s from a well-known family that disowned him, and he's a man, so there's this historical precedence with their relationships with musicians - not so much music as it's this abstract thing - but externally with artists.

Ayshay

I found that most people don't really want to know the truth. There are plenty of people who want to know the truth on their terms or require that the truth be contained within certain boundaries of comfort. But truth can never be known this way. You have to seek truth from a place of not knowing, and that can be a very threatening place because we think we already know the truth or we are afraid of what the truth might be.

Jim Palmer

The very nature of limiting something from an infinite to moments in time creates distortion; analog recording methods create all kinds of distortion, they're just not digital distortion.

Kevin Shields

But in fact as knowledge expands globally it is being lost locally. This is the paramount truth of the modern history of rural places everywhere in the world. And it is the gravest problem of land use: Modern humans typically are using places whose nature they have never known and whose history they have forgotten; thus ignorant, they almost necessarily abuse what they use.

Wendell Berry

Truth is dangerous. It topples palaces and kills kings. It stirs gentle men to rage and bids them take up arms. It wakes old grievances and opens forgotten wounds. It is the mother of the sleepless night and the hag-ridden day. And yet there is one thing that is more dangerous than Truth. Those who would silence Truth’s voice are more destructive by far. It is most perilous to be a speaker of Truth. Sometimes one must choose to be silent, or be silenced. But if a truth cannot be spoken, it must at least be known. Even if you dare not speak truth to others, never lie to yourself.

Frances Hardinge

The person one loves never really exists, but is a projection focused through the lens of the mind onto whatever screen it fits with least distortion.

Arthur C. Clarke

The first step is to penetrate the clouds of deceit and distortion and learn the truth about the world, then to organize and act to change it. That's never been impossible and never been easy.

Noam Chomsky

To subvert is not the aim of literature, its value lies in discovering and revealing what is rarely known, little known, thought to be known but in fact not very well known of the truth of the human world. It would seem that truth is the unassailable and most basic quality of literature.

Gao Xingjian

Though I'd always known in an intellectual way that rock and roll was a 'black' form - the way I know that English breakfast tea is Indian - I had never felt this truth.

Thomas Chatterton Williams

At the beginning of the new millennium, we still do not know why mathematics is true and whether it is certain. But we know what we do not know in an immeasurably richer way than we did. And learning this has been a remarkable achievement-among the greatest and least-known of the modern era.

David Berlinski

Mystery is the antagonist of truth. It is a fog of human invention, that obscures truth, and represents it in distortion.

Thomas Paine

The truth is not distorted here, but rather a distortion is used to get at truth.

Flannery O'Connor

This truth may be unfashionable, unpalatable, no doubt unpopular, but, if it is the truth, the story of mankind shows that war was universal and unceasing for millions of years before armaments were invented or armies organized. Indeed, the lucid intervals of peace and order only occurred in human history after armaments in the hands of strong governments have come into being, and civilization in every age has been nursed only in cradles guarded by superior weapons and superior discipline.