Thomas Sowell Quotes

Truthful words are not beautiful; beautiful words are not truthful. Good words are not persuasive; persuasive words are not good.

Granny Weatherwax was firmly against fiction. Life was hard enough without lies floating around and changing the way people thought.

There's just no substitute for the truth.

It is a true story, the monster said. Many things that are true feel like a cheat.

You people are telling me what you think I want to know. I want to know what is actually happening.

Things and actions are what they are, and the consequences of them will be what they will be: why then should we desire to be deceived?

For, if a good speaker, never so eloquent, does not see into the fact, and is not speaking the truth of that - is there a more horrid kind of object in creation?

A thing is not necessarily true because badly uttered, nor false because spoken magnificently.

Truth exists; only lies are invented.

I'm not big into images. I'm into reality.

Truth is the ultimate power. When the truth comes around, all the lies have to run and hide.

Falsehood has an infinity of combinations, but truth has only one mode of being.

People are always afraid of the truth.

Truth: An ingenious compound of desirability and appearance …

People are starved for the truth, and when something comes along that even looks like the truth, people will latch onto it because everything's so false.

I had had enough pretend. I wanted to be in the real world.

Reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.

Truth is beautiful, without doubt; but so are lies.

The finest and noblest ground on which people can live is truth; the real with the real; a ground on which nothing is assumed.

Truth is truth howe'er it strike.

Esse quam videri," Celia says. "To be, rather than to seem.

Like all valuable commodities, truth is often counterfeited.

Truth is not so threadbare as speech, because fewer people can make use of it.

And they'll vote for me because I'm the best liar, because I do it honestly, with a certain finesse. They know that lies and truth are very close, and that something beautiful rests between.

Truth that is naked is the most beautiful, and the simpler its expression the deeper is the impression it makes; this is partly because it gets unobstructed hold of the hearer’s mind without his being distracted by secondary thoughts, and partly because he feels that here he is not being corrupted or deceived by the arts of rhetoric, but that the whole effect is got from the thing itself.