Orson Scott Card on Truth

"“I’m a terrible salesman,” he finally said. “I always tell the truth about what I’m selling, and then nobody buys it."

"How could you tell, when utter honesty and cynical manipulation would each account completely for the things she said and did?"

"Wasn’t that their natural right, to know the truth so as to be able to let the truth lead them to do good or evil, as they chose?"

"Knowing something may be a terrible burden to bear, but it holds no danger to them as aren’t afraid of truth."

"“Everybody thinks they want to see the truth,” said Tenkswa-Tawa. “That’s one of the lies we tell ourselves."

"Please open your mind to the possibility that I might be an honest man who was himself deceived."

"The only true vision comes not from God but from the inmost recesses of the human mind."

"Folks always seemed to think that as long as they didn’t know about something bad, it wasn’t happening, so whoever told them actually caused it to be true."

"I’m neutral on lying, seeing as how there’s times when the truth just hurts people."

"I believe in everything that seems true to me right now. I just refuse to be surprised when some of those things I believe in now turn out to be false later."

"I always tell what I believe. Whether it's true, I'm no more sure than any man."

"Peggy chose her words to be true, and therefore beautiful, and therefore good."

"No man can bear to live with a woman who speaks nothing but the truth to him."

"They never noticed that he was in fact what they only pretended to be."

"Everything possible to be believed is an image of the truth."

"Honesty always sounds like impudence to the vain and stupid."

"What the White man had won with so much blood and dishonesty was not the living land of the Red man, but the corpse of that land. It was decay that the White man won. It would turn to dust in his hands, Alvin knew it."

"The barrier was only in my mind — which is true of this barrier as well. The more firmly I try to cross the barrier, the more firmly I'm rejected. Well, maybe it's the intention to cross the boundary that pushes me away."

"Money only buys the illusion of power. Real power is in the force of will — will strong enough that others bend to it for its own sake, and follow it willingly. Power that is won through deception will evaporate under the hot light of truth."

"The first of a thousand lies. Truth flowed to Micah Quill, was sucked in and disappeared, and emerged again looking ever so much like it used to, but changed subtly, at the edges, where none would notice, so that simple truth became a complicated fabric indeed, one that could wrap you up so tightly and close you off from the air until you suffocated in it."