truth on Popular Opinion

Truth’ [is] what we think it is at any given moment of time.

I have never wished to cater to the crowd; for what I know they do not approve, and what they approve I do not know.

While sexual sin, financial scandals, and toxic work environments hurt pastoral credibility, a more subtle, and probably more common danger is carelessness with the truth. Intellectual integrity matte...

What is right is not always popular and what is popular is not always right.

80 percent of Americans agree with the statement “an individual should arrive at his or her own religious beliefs independent of any church or synagogue.”

Almighty God, you proclaim your truth in every age by many voices: Direct, in our time, we pray, those who speak where many listen and write what many read; that they may do their part in making the h...

Most of the change we think we see in life is due to truths being in and out of favor.

Everyone is entitled to his own opinions, but not to his own facts.

Pragmatism may be defined simply as the approach to reality that defines truth as “that which works.” The pragmatist is concerned about results, and the results determine the truth. The problem with t...

In a room where people unanimously maintain a conspiracy of silence, one word of truth sounds like a pistol shot.

Almighty God, we often look to the words of the world, rather than your Word. We follow the opinions of acquaintances, the popularity of celebrities, and the drive of leaders. We look all around us be...

One of the great problems of history is that the concepts of love and power have usually been contrasted as opposites, polar opposites, so that love is identified with a resignation of power, and powe...

Most writers regard the truth as their most valuable possession, and therefore are most economical in its use.

Pretty much all the honest truth telling there is in the world is done by children.

It's discouraging to think how many people are shocked by honesty and how few by deceit.

Truth enjoys but a short time of triumph between two long eras — in the first of them it is condemned as paradoxical, in the last is despised as trivial..

Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did, and it never will.

Paradox has been defined as “Truth standing on her head to attract attention."

Emerson once observed, Do you love me? actually means Do you see the same truth? Or at least . . . Do you care about the same truth?”

In the land whose founding metaphor was the mutuality of John Winthrop’s seventeenth-century vision of a “city set on a hill,” we live more and more in estranged, hostile, exclusive enclaves, linked o...

An important representative of the pluralist position has been the British Protestant theologian John Hick, an unusually prolific and articulate writer. Hick has hit on a very graphic metaphor: He cal...

There’s a somewhat naïve belief among some that, in general, most people are inherently good. While many Christians may not fully embrace John Calvin’s doctrine of total depravity (which I believe is ...

“Here’s something to think about: How come you never see a headline like ‘Psychic Wins Lottery’?”

In the novel The Second Coming one of Walker Percy’s characters says about Christians, “I cannot be sure they don’t have the truth. But if they have the truth, why is it the case that they are rep...

Recently, when I was in London, I went to the National Gallery. It was a weekday, but it was still crowded with people wearing headsets, staring at famous paintings, listening to a narrator explain th...

Get your facts first, and then you can distort 'em as much as you please.

The problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete.

The final thing leaders will need is courage … the willingness to tell the truth, to say what is not politely or politically acceptable. … The most common expression of the courage to tell the truth i...

Tell truth, and shame the devil.

Often, the surest way to convey misinformation is to tell the strict truth.