In matters of truth the fact that you don’t want to publish something is, nine times out of ten, a proof that you ought to publish it.

It’s so hard to know what to do when one wishes earnestly to do right.

The reason that fiction is more interesting than any other form of literature, to those who really like to study people, is that in fiction the author can really tell the truth without humiliating himself.

If you tell the truth, you don’t have to remember anything.

A man is never more truthful than when he acknowledges himself a liar.

We need someone with superb judgement in their own right because, yes, a president can hire the best advisors on Earth, but I guarantee you this: Five advisors will give five different opinions. And it is the president – and the president alone – who always makes the final call.

The least initial deviation from the truth is multiplied later a thousandfold.

All of us knows, not what is expedient, not what is going to make us popular, not what the policy is, or the company policy – but in truth each of us knows what is the right thing to do. And that’s how I am guided.

A jury consists of twelve persons chosen to decide who has the better lawyer.

Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.

What we have to do, what at any rate it is our duty to do, is to revive the old art of Lying.

The moment I said I’d finished a book, I knew what would happen. There would be a bidding war, and I would end up with someone who’d got the fattest wallet, who had bought it because I’d written Harry Potter. That would have been why.

The most costly of all follies is to believe passionately in the palpably not true. It is the chief occupation of mankind.

Next to doing the right thing, the most important thing is to let people know you are doing the right thing.

Power is not sufficient evidence of truth.

When I’m in management meetings when we’re deciding my future, those decisions are left up to me. I’m the one who has to go out and fulfill all these obligations, so I should be able to choose which ones I do or not. That’s the part of my life where I feel most in control.

I have considered voting Conservative because I am so against the Labour party.

We should not be so taken up in the search for truth, as to neglect the needful duties of active life; for it is only action that gives a true value and commendation to virtue.

It’s getting harder to make decisions to just want to do something to work… I’m trying to find things that are extremely challenging or mean something to me deeply.

The day-to-day making of policy is arguing all the time. You’re trying to get the right approach and the right answer, and there are moments that aren’t very pleasant. But in the end, you look at the overall product.

I went into the business for the money, and the art grew out of it. If people are disillusioned by that remark, I can’t help it. It’s the truth.

I definitely connected to the fact that life gets out of control and you end up doing things and wishing you were doing other things instead.

The most difficult thing is the decision to act, the rest is merely tenacity. The fears are paper tigers. You can do anything you decide to do. You can act to change and control your life; and the procedure, the process is its own reward.

There is some self-interest behind every friendship. There is no friendship without self-interests. This is a bitter truth.

If you want to be a good strategist, you can never just go off a principle you read in a book. You need to adapt what you do to the situation; no rule of thumb is true all the time.

Founding a company is hard. Most of it isn’t smooth. You’ll have to make very hard decisions. You have to fire a few people. Therefore, if you don’t believe in your mission, giving up is easy. The majority of founders give up. But the best founders don’t give up.

It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it. If you think about that, you’ll do things differently.

Justice and truth are too such subtle points that our tools are too blunt to touch them accurately.

It will be of little avail to the people that the laws are made by men of their own choice if the laws be so voluminous that they cannot be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be understood.

I’m substantially concerned about the policy directions of the space agency. We have a situation in the U.S. where the White House and Congress are at odds over what the future direction should be. They’re sort of playing a game and NASA is the shuttlecock that they’re hitting back and forth.

The issues a president faces are not black and white, and cannot be boiled down into 140 characters. Because when you have the nuclear codes at your fingertips and the military at your command, you can’t make snap decisions. You can’t have a thin skin or the tendency to lash out.

It is dangerous for mortal beauty, or terrestrial virtue, to be examined by too strong a light. The torch of Truth shows much that we cannot, and all that we would not, see.

If you’re a quarterback, you want everything on your shoulders. You want to be the one to make the decisions.

If I don’t run for president, we’ll all be OK.

The passive aggressive arguer comes armed with tricky tactics. They cannot take the risk that they might be wrong: their self-esteem is too intertwined with their opinions. It is more important to affirm their rightness, and sense of superiority, than to arrive at the truth.

I don’t really get into a big intellectual analysis of why I am going to do a certain script or not.

A state of society where men may not speak their minds cannot long endure.

Nothing is worth doing unless the consequences may be serious.

A leader who doesn’t hesitate before he sends his nation into battle is not fit to be a leader.

I was offered a job on Wall Street by my uncle. But I wanted to get out. Make-it-on-my-own kinda thing.

The truth is found when men are free to pursue it.

The thing that makes my clothes really different is that, number one, they are really great designs; they’re not tacky; they are very professional; the design is made from lots of decisions.

I promised myself that I would write as well as I can, tell the truth, not to tell everything I know, but to make sure that everything I tell is true, as I understand it. And to use the eloquence which my language affords me.

One must verify or expel his doubts, and convert them into the certainty of Yes or NO.

The great quest of life has always been to discover truth.

There are only two mistakes one can make along the road to truth; not going all the way, and not starting.

In too much of the West, everyone wants the guarantee of safety, and never having to make any decisions.

To compromise simply means that you go a tiny bit below what you know is right.

My dad seemed comfortable with his decision to be a ‚have-not,‘ but I knew that I wasn’t.

I do not know what I may appear to the world; but to myself, I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself now and then in finding a smoother pebble or prettier shell than ordinary, while the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.

A wise ruler ought never to keep faith when by doing so it would be against his interests.

Every act you have ever performed since the day you were born was performed because you wanted something.

Yet it is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top.

When making your choice in life, do not neglect to live.

To the extent I am known, I think I am known as a person who expresses his opinion freely about things – and I was sensitive to the possibility that if I was seen taking money for saying nice things about a product, my comments and choices and opinions would become, understandably, suspect.

You can’t have a value structure without a hierarchy. They’re the same thing because a value structure means one thing takes precedence over another.

The truth is rarely pure and never simple.

If you want to become fully mature in the Lord, you must learn to love truth. Otherwise, you will always leave open a door of deception for the enemy to take what is meant to be yours.

It’s no exaggeration to say that the undecideds could go one way or another.

One reason I don’t want to play in England again is because we don’t have any personalities.

By giving people the power to share, we’re making the world more transparent.