Every man has a right to be wrong in his opinions. But no man has a right to be wrong in his facts.

Logic: The art of thinking and reasoning in strict accordance with the limitations and incapacities of the human misunderstanding.

Positive, adj.: Mistaken at the top of one's voice.

A conclusion is the place where you get tired of thinking.

There is one thing a professor can be absolutely certain of: almost every student entering the university believes, or says he believes, that truth is relative. . . . They are unified only in their relativism and in their allegiance to equality. And the two are related in a moral intention. The relativity of truth is not a theoretical insight but a moral postulate, the condition of a free society, or so they see it.

The opposite of a correct statement is a false statement. But the opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth.

Life is the art of drawing sufficient conclusions from insufficient premises.

When I come upon anything--in Logic or in any other hard subject--that entirely puzzles me, I find it a capital plan to talk it over, aloud, even when I am all alone. One can explain things so clearly to one's self! And then, you know, one is so patient with one's self: one never gets irritated at one's own stupidity!

Men occasionally stumble on the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing had happened.

A good memory is needed after one has lied.

Although this sentence begins with the word "because", it is false. This line from Shakespeare has delusions of grandeur. The whole point of this sentence is to make clear what the whole point of this sentence is.

The secular university is scandalized by the claims of revelation. Those who have, for whatever historical reasons, become seekers-on-principle, cannot tolerate the allegation that truth is a gift. To have to receive offends those who have determined to take.

We desire truth and find in ourselves nothing but uncertainty. We seek happiness and find only wretchedness and death. We are incapable of not desiring truth and happiness and incapable of certainty or happiness.

The gospel cannot be "proved," he says, because that would presuppose a truth more fundamental than the gospel, by which the gospel can be proved.

History records no more gallant struggle than that of humanity against the truth.

The Washington Post recently published a contest for readers in which they were asked to supply alternative meanings for various words. The following were some of the winning entries: Abdicate (v.), to give up all hope of ever having a flat stomach. Carcinoma (n.), a valley in California, notable for its heavy smog. Esplanade (v.), to attempt an explanation while drunk. Willy-nilly (adj.), impotent Flabbergasted (adj.), appalled over how much weight you have gained. Negligent (adj.), describes a condition in which you absentmindedly answer the door in your nightie. Lymph (v.), to walk with a lisp. Coffee (n.), a person who is coughed upon. Balderdash (n.), a rapidly receding hairline. Testicle (n.), a humorous question on an exam. Rectitude (n.), the formal, dignified demeanor assumed by a proctologist immediately before he examines you. Oyster (n.), a person who sprinkles his conversation with Yiddish expressions. Circumvent (n.), the opening in the front of boxer shorts. Frisbatarianism (n.), The belief that, when you die, your soul goes up on the roof and gets stuck there.

If Christianity should happen to be true -- that is to say, if its God is the real God of the universe -- then defending it may mean talking about anything and everything. Things can be irrelevant to the proposition that Christianity is false, but nothing can be irrelevant to the proposition that Christianity is true. [All] things not only may have something to do with the Christian God, but must have something to do with Him if He lives and reigns.

"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled."

"The young specialist in English Lit... lectured me severely on the fact that in every century people have thought they understood the Universe at last, and in every century they were proved to be wrong. It follows that the one thing we can say about our modern 'knowledge' is that it is wrong. ...My answer to him was, ...when people thought the Earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the Earth was spherical they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the Earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the Earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together."

"Reading Mr. Malcolm Muggeridge's brilliant and depressing book, The Thirties, I thought of a rather cruel trick I once played on a wasp. He was sucking jam on my plate, and I cut him in half. He paid no attention, merely went on with his meal, while a tiny stream of jam trickled out of his severed esophagus. Only when he tried to fly away did he grasp the dreadful thing that had happened to him. It is the same with modern man. The thing that has been cut away is his soul, and there was a period - twenty years, perhaps - during which he did not notice it."

"It is hard to believe that a man is telling the truth when you know that you would lie if you were in his place."

I read of a guy who lived in Tennessee in 1889. His name was Chadsworth. He apparently was a scoundrel, and was finally hanged for horse stealing and train robbery. The only known photo of him shows him standing on the gallows. The inscription informs us: "Chadsworth, horse thief, sent to prison in 1885, escaped in 1887, robbed the Tennessee Flyer train six times, caught by Pinkerton detectives, convicted and hanged." Well, the family didn't really want that on the record so they changed the story just a bit. It read: "Chadsworth was a famous rancher in early Tennessee history. His business empire grew to include acquisition of valuable equestrian assets and intimate dealings with the Tennessee railroad. Beginning in 1883, he devoted several years at a government facility, finally taking leave to resume his dealings with the railroad. In 1887, he was a key player in a vital investigation by the renowned Pinkerton Detective Agency. In 1889, Chadsworth passed away during an important civic function held in his honor when the platform upon which he was standing collapsed." And some wag has recently added, "And thus passed the very first hanging Chad." See, the family didn't really change any of the facts of poor old Chadsworth's life--they just put a different "spin" on them.

We can easily forgive a child who is afraid of the dark; the real tragedy of life is when men are afraid of the light.

All science is dominated by the idea of approximation. When someone tells you that they know the exact truth about anything, you are safe in inferring that you have heard from an inexact person.

Garden of Eden: the old game of two truths and a lie "your eyes will be opened, you will become like God, you will know good from evil"

In the January 20 issue of the Leadership Weekly newsletter (from the editors of Leadership Journal), Ben Patterson writes, "Few issues portend so much for the future of the church, because none carries so much potential to fly in the face of the spirit of the age. I speak of the infatuation with pluralism and inclusivism and certain brands of multiculturalism; the belief in the egalitarianism of opinions and feelings — that it is not only wrong, but rude and bigoted to this that some people's ideas and feelings may not be as good or as valid as others. It's the "Who's to Say?" syndrome: Who's to say what is right? The answer is everyone, or no one, or both. Whatever. It's cool. "Faithful stewards of the household of God must practice the discipline of saying both yes and no. It's hard, it's not fun, and it doesn't usually preach to packed houses. But believers in every age have had to learn it or lose the faith. It wasn't enough for Nicea to say that Christ was begotten of the Father. It had to say, 'begotten, not made.' It wasn't enough for the signers of the Barmen Declaration to declare that Christ was Lord; they had to add that Hitler was not. "Without declaring the no, we become the church that Machen observed in his day: 'conservative in an ignorant, non-polemic, sweetness-and-light kind of way, which is just meat for the wolves.' "Saying no is part of the nature of our faith, a faith that Alan Watts, the Anglican-turned-Hindu, found to be 'a contentious faith . . . uncompromising, ornery, militant, rigorous, imperious, and invincibly self-righteous.' So be it. But its narrowness is the narrowness of the birth canal, or of a path between two precipices-or of a lifetime spent loving one woman."

There is all the difference in the world between believing that we are right and believing that everyone is wrong. Unshakable conviction is a Christian virtue; unyielding intolerance is a sin.

There are no entirely false opinions. The listener, then, must proceed from what is valid in the opinions of the speaker to the fuller and purer truth as he, the listener, understands it.

Men must fumble awhile with error to separate it from truth, I think—as long as they don't seize the error hungrily because it has a pleasanter taste.

I was reminded how much our ministry matters as I reflected on two very different events at Stanford: the Veritas Forum and a campus Playboy shoot. The two played out like a real-life version of truth or dare. First, truth. We were delighted to co-sponsor the Veritas Forum at Stanford. We brought in leading Christian intellectuals such as Dallas Willard, Gary Habermas, and Michael Behe to engage students and faculty in discussions about life's hardest questions and the relevance of Jesus Christ. It was incredible! The highlight for me was observing Christian philosopher Dallas Willard debate Richard Rorty (one of the the most influential philosophers in America today). The whole week was a powerful reminder that the Christian faith is reasonable and worthy of careful investigation. But we went from truth to dare as Playboy came to town and students disrobed to pose for the magazine's annual college issue. The Stanford Daily urged readers to participate, saying that prejudice against pornography "is an unfortunate product of our society, and one that ought to be addressed." The editorial went on to make the case that Playboy was a high-class, upstanding literary magazine. The difference between the two events was inadvertently summed up a senior named Erica. When asked by a local paper about some consequences of her decision to pose, she said, "I guess I hadn't thought it out too thoroughly." And so we'll keep sponsoring events like the Veritas Forum, we'll keep hosting Bible studies in the dorms, and we'll keep talking about things like the reliability of the Bible, because today's students desperately need to be challenged to think.

Logically, of course, examples cannot stand as proof, but psychologically they work with argument to gain acceptance. If you wanted to argue that all truth is equally valid but not equally valuable, you might use an analogy to get your audience to accept what you are saying. A penny and a dollar bill are both genuine, you may point out, but they are not of equal worth. Therefore we must distinguish between penny- and dollar-truth.

The Plain Truth

My father said whoever tells the longest story is always the liar. The truth isn't that complicated.