Truism Quotes

• It is a truism that almost any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.

  Robert A. Heinlein

  Inspirational, Life, War

  Robert A. Heinlein (2014). “Revolt in 2100”, p.124, Hachette UK

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• It is a truism that almost any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creeds into law if it acquires the political power to do so, and will follow it by suppressing opposition, subverting all education to seize early the minds of the young, and by killing, locking up, or driving underground all heretics.

  Robert A. Heinlein

  Law, Political, Mind

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• And it has become a kind of a truism in the study of creativity that you can't be creating anything with less than 10 years of technical knowledge immersion in a particular field.

  Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

  Creativity, Years, Creating

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• Everybody wants peace. That's a truism. There is no point in accomplishing through war what you can accomplish through peace.

  Norman Finkelstein

  War, Want, Accomplish

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• I've never had a problem with the old truism about dancing to architecture. I think you can dance to architecture. There's some pretty funky architecture to dance to.

  Rob Chapman

  Thinking, Dancing, Architecture

  "ROB CHAPMAN (author of “A VERY IRREGULAR HEAD: THE LIFE OF SYD BARRETT”)". Revolt Of The Apes Interview, revoltoftheapes.com. January 25, 2011.

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• 

  The trouble with the rat race is that even if you win, you're still a rat.

  Lily Tomlin

  Inspirational, Funny, Meaningful

  Quoted in People, 26 Dec. 1977. Although now associated with Tomlin, this saying appears anonymously in Robert Reisner, Graffiti (1971), in the form "Remember, even if you win the rat race - you're still a rat." Rosalie Maggio, in New Beacon Book of Quotations by Women, states that William Sloane Coffin said "Even if you win the rat-race, you're still a rat" as a chaplain at Williams College or Yale University in the 1950s or 1960s.

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• Where this age differs from those immediately preceding it is that a liberal intelligentsia is lacking. Bully-worship, under various disguises, has become a universal religion, and such truisms as that a machine-gun is still a machine-gun even when a "good" man is squeezing the trigger have turned into heresies which it is actually becoming dangerous to utter.

  George Orwell

  Gun, Men, Bully

  George Orwell, Sonia Orwell, Ian Angus (1968). “The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell: An age like this, 1920-1940”, Harvill Secker

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• It's a familiar truism that at any one moment, financial markets are dominated by either fear or greed. But the healthiest markets are those that are animated by both fear and greed at the same time.

  James Surowiecki

  Fear, Greed, Financial

  James Surowiecki (2005). “The Wisdom of Crowds”, p.241, Anchor

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• Avarice, greed, concupiscence and so forth are all based on the mathematical truism that the more you get, the more you have. The remark of that it is more blessed to give than to receive is based on the human truth that the more you give away in love, the more you are. It is not just for the sake of other people that tells us to give rather than get, but for our own sakes too.

  Frederick Buechner

  Blessed, People, Giving

  FaceBook post by Frederick Buechner from Mar 27, 2014

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• Is religion a force for good? The evidence of history and the evidence of current events cast doubt on the truism.

  James A. Haught

  Religious, Evil, Doubt

  James A. Haught (1990). “Holy horrors: an illustrated history of religious murder and madness”

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• It's a truism that denials never quite catch up with charges. Honest journalists who may have mistakenly printed false information know that the most prominent retraction never quite undoes the damage done by the original publication.

  Tom Wicker

  May, Information, Never Quit

  "IN THE NATION; Lesson of Lattimore" by Tom Wicker, www.nytimes.com. June 9, 1989.

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• You know, it's a truism that writers for children must still be children themselves, deep down, must still feel childish feelings, and a child's surprise at the world.

  A. S. Byatt

  Children, Feelings, World

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• Every patient reacts a little differently, both biologically and psychologically. The only constant in cancer is inconstancy; the only certainty is a future of uncertainty, a truism for all of modern life but one made vivid by life-threatening illness.

  Jonathan Alter

  Cancer, Modern Life, Littles

  Jonathan Alter (2008). “Between the Lines: A View Inside American Politics, People, and Culture”

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• It is the simple truth that man does differ from the brutes in kind and not in degree; and the proof of it is here; that it sounds like a truism to say that the most primitive man drew a picture of a monkey and that it sounds like a joke to say that the most intelligent monkey drew a picture of a man. Something of division and disproportion has appeared; and it is unique. Art is the signature of man.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Art, Intelligent, Unique

  "The Everlasting Man". Book by Gilbert K. Chesterton, Part I: On the Creature Called Man, 1925.

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• The theory of truth is a series of truisms.

  J. L. Austin

  Truth, Theory, Series

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• It was a truism that all civilizations were basically neurotic until they made contact with everybody else and found their place within the ever-changing meta-civilisation of other beings, because, until then, during the stage when they honestly believed they might be entirely alone in existence, all solo societies were possessed of both an inflated sense of their own importance and a kind of existential terror at the sheer scale and apparent emptiness of the universe.

  Iain Banks

  Civilization, Might, Emptiness

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• I conceive disgust at those impertinent and misbecoming familiarities, inscribed upon your ordinary tombstones. Every dead man must take upon himself to be lecturing me with his odious truism, that "such as he now is, I must shortly be." Not so shortly, friend, perhaps, as thou imaginest. In the meantime I am alive. I move about. I am worth twenty of thee. Know thy betters!

  Charles Lamb

  Tombstone, Moving, Men

  Charles Lamb, Mary Lamb (2017). “Delphi Complete Works of Charles and Mary Lamb (Illustrated)”, p.736, Delphi Classics

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• Ever since Richard Nixon walloped George McGovern in the presidential election of 1972, political pundits have treated as a truism the proposition that liberals are out of step with the rest of the nation, and therefore all but unelectable outside the precincts of the Northeast -- give or take a college town here or a ski resort there. During the course of every presidential election for the past forty years now, Republicans have sought to wield the word liberal as if it were a six-gauge shotgun.

  Eric Alterman

  Past, College, Years

  Eric Alterman (2008). “Why We're Liberals: A Handbook for Restoring America's Most Important Ideals”, p.10, Penguin

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• The life of God - the life which the mind apprehends and enjoys as it rises to the absolute unity of all things - may be described as a play of love with itself; but this idea sinks to an edifying truism, or even to a platitude, when it does not embrace in it the earnestness, the pain, the patience, and labor, involved in the negative aspect of things.

  Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

  God, Pain, Play

  "The Phenomenology of Spirit". Book by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, 1807.

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• The public, as a whole, does not demand or appreciate the pure expression of beauty. Its cultured members expect to find in poetry, if anything, repose from material and nervous anxiety; an apt or chiselled phrase strokes the appetites and tickles the imagination. The more general public merely enjoys its platitudes and truisms jerked on to the understanding in line and rhyme; truth put into metre sounds overwhelmingly true.

  Harold Monro

  Art, Expression, Appreciate

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• Every commonplace or trite observation is not a truism.

  Charles Lamb

  Observation, Commonplace

  Charles Lamb (2008). “The Life, Letters, and Writings of Charles Lamb”, p.159, Cosimo, Inc.

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• It is a general truism of this world that anything long divided will surely unite, and anything long united will surely divide.

  Luo Guanzhong

  Long, World, United

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• The name Bowie just appealed to me when I was younger. I was into a kind of heavy philosophy thing when I was 16 years old, and I wanted a truism about cutting through the lies and all that.

  David Bowie

  Philosophy, Lying, Cutting

  David Bowie (2016). “David Bowie: The Last Interview”, p.49, Melville House

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• Occasionally the impossible happens; this is a truism that accounts for much of what we call good luck; and also, bad.

  Faith Baldwin

  Good Luck, Impossible, Accounts

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• It's a truism in technological development that no silver lining comes without its cloud.

  Bruce Sterling

  Clouds, Technological Development, Silver

  1993 Opening statement to the House Subcommittee on Telecommunications and Finance,Washington DC, 29 Apr.

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