He that is ashamed to speak the truth has need to be ashamed of himself.
Genuine bravery for a writer... It is about calmly speaking the truth when everyone else is silenced, when the truth cannot be expressed. It is about speaking out with a different voice, risking the wrath of the state and offending everyone, for the sake of the truth, and the writer's conscience.
When we speak truth to power we are ignored at best and brutally suppressed at worst
I always speak the truth. Not the whole truth, because there's no way, to say it all. Saying it all is literally impossible: words fail. Yet it's through this very impossibility that the truth holds onto the real.
Teach the youth to speak the truth, show them what peace can do
We may well be the ones Proverbs warns when it reminds us: "Kings take pleasure in honest lips; they value the one who speaks the truth." The point is clear: If the people speak and the king doesn't listen, there is something wrong with the king. If the king acts precipitously and the people say nothing, something is wrong with the people.
A more appropriate expansion is the statement "it is the responsibility of intellectuals to speak the truth and expose lies" a transcript of a talk to a writers conference in Australia in 1996, where I had been asked to talk on "writers and intellectual responsibility" - a question that I said I found "puzzling," because I knew of nothing to say about it beyond truisms, though these were perhaps worth affirming because they are "so commonly denied, if not in words, then in consistent practice."
When a woman has the opportunity to speak truth to power, it's important that she does, even if it's just trying to get a crosswalk in her neighborhood. That's how social change happens!
When there is an issue, I approach it and hit it head on. I speak the truth. If I do something wrong, then I own it.
Falsehood and delusion are allowed in no case whatever; but, as in the exercise of all the virtues, there is an economy of truth. It is a sort of temperance, by which a man speaks truth with measure, that he may speak it the longer.
I must speak the truth, even at the risk of being ostracized by my fellow scribblers. In fact, anticipating their rage, I have already applied for a place in the Canada Council's witness-protection program. This because, much as it pains me to turn on my kind, I fear the time has come to admit that far too many celebrated writers were outrageous liars, philanderers, drunks, druggies, unsuitable babysitters, plagiarists, psychopaths, parasites, cowards, indifferent dads or moms and bad credit risks.
He who has once made himself notorious as utterly unprincipled, is not credited even when he speaks the truth.
I've always noticed that if you speak the truth in a rather silly way nobody believes you.
Speaking the truth, once you have started it, is too exhilarating to draw back.
Whatever convenience may be thought to be in falsehood and dissimulation, it is soon over; but the inconvenience of it is perpetual, because it brings a man under everlasting jealousy and suspicion, so that he is not believed when he speaks the truth, nor trusted when perhaps he means honestly.
Like all virtuous people he imagines he must speak the truth.
It's your obligation to speak the truth, and everyone can either take it or leave it. But truth must be in us. We live in such a poverty of truth today.
Comedians, such as yourself, Jon Stewart and others, are a valuable supplement, and here's why: Good journalism at its best frequently speaks truth to power. What's happened with journalists - again, I don't except myself from this criticism - in some ways we've lost our guts. We need a spine transplant. What's happened is comedians, in their own way, speak truth to power and fill that vacuum that we in journalism have too often left, particularly post 9/11.
The period of a [Persian] boy's education is between the ages of five and twenty, and he is taught three things only: to ride, to use the bow, and to speak the truth.
A lot of publishers have close relationships with people in power. So the press, which used to speak truth to power, doesn't. The big result of that has been the erosion of trust.
Therefore, let me in honesty speak the truth about our epoch and people.
If all I get is a little controversy for speaking the truth, if I did less, I would not be worth living.
The time-honored role of the artist [is] to speak truth to power.
I know everybody wants humor to be subversive and speak truth to power. I don't think power's been listening, incidentally.
I don't pretend to make my photographs speak the truth of what Mexico is all about. But in its villages I can feel the way culture is changing, and it's fascinating to live through it and try to capture it on camera.
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