"Truth and clarity are complementary."

Niels Bohr Philosophy See all quotes by Niels Bohr →

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“Oh, what idiots we all have been. This is just as it must be.”

“I am absolutely prepared to talk about the spiritual life of an electronic computer: to state that it is reflecting or is in a bad mood... The question whether the machine really feels or ponders, or whether it merely looks as though it did, is of course absolutely meaningingless.”

“How wonderful that we have met with a paradox. Now we have some hope of making progress.”

“Never express yourself more clearly than you are able to think.”

“Every valuable human being must be a radical and a rebel, for what he must aim at is to make things better than they are.”

“It is not enough to be wrong, one must also be polite.”

Resonant Thoughts

"The need for truth is not constant; no more than is the need for repose. An idea which is a distortion may have a greater intellectual thrust than the truth; it may better serve the needs of the spiri…"

— Susan Sontag

Literature1933–2004

#truth

"The poets are wrong of course. ... But then poets are almost always wrong about facts. That's because they are not really interested in facts: only in truth: which is why the truth they speak is so tr…"

— William Faulkner

Literature1923–1962

#truth

"There is no other way of guarding oneself against flattery than by letting men understand that they will not offend you by speaking the truth; but when everyone can tell you the truth, you lose their …"

— Niccolò Machiavelli

Philosophy1449–1527

#truth

"It was admitted by all her friends, and also by her enemies — who were in truth the more numerous and active body of the two — that Lizzie Greystock had done very well with herself."

— Anthony Trollope

Politics1815–1882

#truth