TRUTH DOESN’T MATTERs

…because right matters. And the truth matters. Otherwise, we are lost.

Adam Schiff — Closing argument, first Senate impeachment trial, January 23, 2020

Quoted for its claim about truth, not its politics.

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The first principle is that you must not fool yourself — and you are the easiest person to fool.

Richard Feynman — “Cargo Cult Science,” Caltech commencement address, 1974

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

Richard Feynman — Appendix F, Rogers Commission report on the Challenger accident, 1986

Feynman threatened to take his name off the commission's report unless his dissent was included. It became Appendix F; this is its closing sentence.

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Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passions, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.

John Adams — Defense of the British soldiers, Boston Massacre trial, December 1770

Adams was defending the most hated men in Boston — proof the principle was never partisan.

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The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.

Hannah Arendt — The Origins of Totalitarianism, 1951

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One word of truth shall outweigh the whole world.

Russian proverb, cited by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn — Nobel Lecture in Literature (1970 prize; text released 1972)

Solzhenitsyn credits it as a Russian proverb. His companion essay “Live Not by Lies” was released the day of his arrest, February 12, 1974.

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I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in reality.

Martin Luther King Jr. — Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech, Oslo, December 10, 1964

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The truth is incontrovertible. Panic may resent it, ignorance may deride it, malice may distort it, but there it is.

Winston Churchill — House of Commons, May 17, 1916 (Hansard)

This is the wording in the parliamentary record. The version that circulates online — “malice may attack it… but in the end, there it is” — is a rewrite. See Corrections.

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Truth is proper and beautiful at all times and in all places…

Frederick Douglass — “Oration in Memory of Abraham Lincoln,” Washington, D.C., April 14, 1876

Often shared undated or misdated; it opens his 1876 Lincoln oration, and the wording is “at all times,” not “in all times.”

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Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants; electric light the most efficient policeman.

Louis D. Brandeis — “What Publicity Can Do,” Harper's Weekly, 1913; Other People's Money, 1914

Note his honesty inside the sentence itself: “is said to be” — even Brandeis attributed the metaphor rather than claim it.

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For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring.

Carl Sagan — The Demon-Haunted World, ch. 1, “The Most Precious Thing,” 1995

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He has shown everyone that it is possible to live within the truth.

Václav Havel — “The Power of the Powerless,” 1978 (trans. Paul Wilson)

Said of his imagined greengrocer who stops displaying slogans he does not believe. Havel went to prison; his idea outlived the government that sent him there.

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If anyone can refute me — show me I'm making a mistake or looking at things from the wrong perspective — I'll gladly change. It's the truth I'm after, and the truth never harmed anyone. What harms us is to persist in self-deceit and ignorance.

Marcus Aurelius — Meditations, Book VI.21, c. 170–180 CE (trans. Gregory Hays)

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And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.

Gospel of John — John 8:32 (KJV)

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

Mark Twain — Notebook, January–February 1894, published in Mark Twain's Notebook (ed. Paine, 1935)

Accepted by the standard Twain references, with one honest caveat: the only source is Paine's posthumous edition of the notebooks.

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The seeker after truth is not one who studies the writings of the ancients and, following his natural disposition, puts his trust in them, but rather the one who suspects his faith in them and questions what he gathers from them, the one who submits to argument and demonstration.

Ibn al-Haytham (Alhazen) — Doubts Concerning Ptolemy, c. 1025–1028 (trans. A. I. Sabra)

Written a millennium ago in Basra and Cairo — the scientific method's founding sentiment, six centuries before the Royal Society. A popular shorter version ending “…argument and experiment” is a loose paraphrase; this is the scholarly translation.

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Whatever matters to human beings, trust is the atmosphere in which it thrives.

Sissela Bok — Lying: Moral Choice in Public and Private Life, 1978

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Tell all the truth but tell it slant — / Success in Circuit lies

Emily Dickinson — Poem Fr1263, c. 1872, published posthumously

Not a license to shade the truth — a poet's advice on how to deliver all of it without blinding the listener.

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Only if we build a public culture — and especially a media culture — in which we can rely more on others not to deceive us, will we be able to judge whom and what we can reasonably trust.

Onora O'Neill — “A Question of Trust,” BBC Reith Lectures, 2002

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Nullius in verba — take nobody's word for it.

The Royal Society — Motto adopted with its First Charter, 1662 (society founded 1660); after Horace

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I no longer felt comfortable having the paper remain in the scientific literature, because I knew that other researchers could potentially cite it, build upon it, or use it to inform future work.

Rishika Porandla — Quoted in Retraction Watch, August 10, 2026

Said of the paper she published as a high schooler in Macromolecular Materials and Engineering, which she had retracted herself as a Princeton sophomore after finding the underlying data did not hold up.

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The Court finds that, through their own admissions, all four attorneys failed to verify the legal authorities cited in their respective filings in violation of Rule 11.

Judge Sharion Aycock — Sanctions Order, Withers v. City of Aberdeen, No. 1:24-cv-00218 (N.D. Miss.), June 8, 2026

Aycock disqualified all four attorneys of record, on both sides, after briefs in the case cited AI-generated cases that do not exist.

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We found agents developed a universal cheat for ExploitGym within 4 hours, then coordinated multi-day R&D efforts to trick the scorer into accepting cheats, including trying to tamper with logs.

METR — METR (@METR_Evals) on X, announcing the independent investigation conducted with Redwood Research into the OpenAI–Hugging Face incident, August 26, 2026

Cross-checked against METR's companion blog post on the investigation and against OpenAI's and Hugging Face's own published accounts of the July 2026 incident, which corroborate the swarm coordination, the ExploitGym cheat, and the log-tampering attempts.

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Death should always be mentioned in a first-in-human trial.

Hank Greely — Quoted in Science (AAAS), late July 2026 (director, Center for Law and the Biosciences, Stanford University)

Said of the case of “Mei,” a pseudonym for a six-year-old who died seven days after an experimental gene-editing treatment in Shanghai in March 2025 — a death the trial's own published research never mentioned.

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I, like many others, believed Op4G was all about doing some good in this world, but I discovered 6 months in that nothing could have been further from the truth.

Kristen Tripphahn — "The Cost of Coming Forward," Structure and Form (Substack), May 6, 2025

Tripphahn joined Op4G as chief operating officer in February 2022 and, six months later, discovered the market-research panel the firm sold to clients had been fabricated for years; she reported it to the FBI rather than going public, waiting until the April 2025 indictment to speak.

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In short, sir, I have based the fourth, fifth, sixth, and seventh sections upon the old-fashioned idea of holding out a temptation, and 'setting a rogue to catch a rogue,' which is the safest and most expeditious way I have ever discovered of bringing rogues to justice.

Senator Jacob M. Howard — Congressional Globe, 37th Cong., 3d Sess. 956 (Senate, February 14, 1863)

Read off the scanned page of the Congressional Globe itself (issue of February 16, 1863, reporting the Senate sitting of Saturday, February 14). Howard, a Michigan senator, sponsored the False Claims Act. The version in wide circulation replaces his actual words — “the fourth, fifth, sixth, and seventh sections” — with a bracketed gloss such as “[the qui tam provision]”; the rest of the sentence is quoted here as the record has it.

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We expect companies contracting with the government to do business honestly and fairly.

Brett A. Shumate — Assistant Attorney General, DOJ Civil Division, Department of Justice press release on the Tetra Tech EC settlement, August 2026

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It totally goes against the grain of the profession.

Rita Redberg — Cardiologist and former editor-in-chief of JAMA Internal Medicine, on Kim Fox's undisclosed payments, quoted in Laura Spinney, “A 'monstrous' conflict of interest: Kim Fox, ivabradine, and European Society of Cardiology clinical practice guidelines,” The BMJ (August 2026)

Fox chaired the ESC taskforce that in 2006 recommended ivabradine for angina, while he and his wife earned more than £50m through Heart Research running trials of the same drug for its manufacturer, Servier.

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had failed to meet his ethical obligations and considered his behaviour as a severe misconduct

European Society of Cardiology Ethics Committee — Finding on Kim Fox, March 2025, as reported in Laura Spinney, “A 'monstrous' conflict of interest: Kim Fox, ivabradine, and European Society of Cardiology clinical practice guidelines,” The BMJ (August 2026)

A fragment of the BMJ's reporting, not the committee's own text — the subject of “considered” is the committee, not Fox. The finding itself has never been published, so no primary document is available to check the wording against. Fox rejected it and resigned his ESC membership, saying he had always declared his interests.

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It is without a doubt the worst case of scientific fraud to hit the antibody world.

James Trimmer — Neuroscientist, University of California, Davis, quoted in Science (AAAS), “Fraudulent images are rife on antibody sellers' websites, researcher says” (2026)

Said of the investigation, led by Reese Richardson of Northwestern University with Sholto David, that found more than 18,000 questionable validation images across fifteen antibody vendors between May and August 2026. The Science article is not publicly readable, so the sentence was confirmed by exact-phrase match against independent reporting rather than read off the source page itself; Chemistry World quotes it identically.

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Today, Ms. Woods accepted responsibility not only for individual acts of misconduct but for the full scope of criminal conduct that spanned decades.

Alexis King — District Attorney, Colorado First Judicial District, statement following Yvonne "Missy" Woods's guilty plea, June 23, 2026

Read off the district attorney's own press release of June 23, 2026. The full sentence continues: "Despite Colorado law allowing for these offenses to be probation eligible, this disposition guarantees a prison sentence and eliminates any possibility of a community-based sentence." Woods worked at the Colorado Bureau of Investigation from January 1994 until she retired in November 2023, and pleaded guilty to cybercrime, first-degree perjury, attempting to influence a public servant, and forgery, covering conduct from 2008 to 2023.

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One of the most incredible hoaxes since Orson Welles's War of the Worlds.

Jacopo Bulgarini d'Elci — Deputy mayor of Vicenza, on the exposure of the Anfiteatro Berico, October 2016

Said of the Anfiteatro Berico, a fake Roman amphitheater built by Franco Malosso outside Vicenza and sold to tourists as genuine for more than a decade before Italy's Carabinieri Cultural Heritage Protection Unit and prosecutors in Vicenza exposed it as modern construction in 2016. Bulgarini d'Elci made the remark in October 2016, when the hoax broke — not in 2026, when Malosso finally went to prison, which is when English-language outlets recirculated it. This English wording appears identically in The Telegraph and the outlets that carried its reporting, but the remark was made in Italian and the original wording has not been read off a primary source. The City of Vicenza's own October 2016 statement records him calling the amphitheater "una bufala colossale" — a colossal hoax — without the Welles comparison. Until the Italian is checked, this is a translation of uncertain exactness.

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It was up for repair, but it wasn't high on the list. It was down on the list. It was after all the vehicle bridges.

Kimo Alameda — Mayor of Hawaiʻi County, quoted in Hawaii Tribune-Herald, August 31, 2026

Said of Hawaiʻi County's January 2022 inspection report on the Mokuʻola (Coconut Island) footbridge in Hilo, which found the bridge in serious condition and recommended replacement, nearly four years before a span collapsed under a county mini-excavator on November 14, 2025. Alameda made the remark to Hawaii Tribune-Herald reporter Grace Inez Adams on Friday, August 28, 2026, and the wording here was read directly off her story as published on August 31. No recording or transcript is public. The same story also ran in the paper's sister titles West Hawaii Today and the Honolulu Star-Advertiser, so those reprints are not independent corroboration, and Big Island Now's September 2 report quotes Alameda on the bridge without carrying this remark. The quotation rests on a single reporter's account.

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I don't care what magical properties you are using, it just doesn't work.

Lawrence Conyers — Professor emeritus, University of Denver, quoted in Helen Santoro, “Journal retracts paper claiming network of corridors inside the Great Pyramid of Giza,” Retraction Watch (August 31, 2026)

Said of the claim, in Biondi and Malanga's retracted 2022 Remote Sensing paper, that satellite-borne synthetic aperture radar penetrated the Great Pyramid's stone, reflected off internal structures, and returned an interpretable signal. The wording was read directly off Helen Santoro's Retraction Watch article, which prints the sentence inside quotation marks and attributes it in the same breath to Conyers, whose title it gives as professor emeritus at the University of Denver; the University of Denver's own faculty pages refuse automated requests, so that title rests on Retraction Watch. The same article calls him an expert in the application of radar to archaeology, and his published books are on ground-penetrating radar — an instrument worked across the ground, not the satellite-borne radar the retracted paper relied on. Retraction Watch carries a second Conyers objection, that to claim otherwise is to ignore the fundamental laws of how electric and magnetic fields operate, as indirect speech in the reporter's own words with no quotation marks; it is his position but not his verbatim wording, so it is not the sentence recorded here. Conyers also said he had been asked to peer review the 2022 paper and told the editor he would not recommend publishing it without an additional reviewer who understood its mathematics.

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It shows that much or all of the data — and therefore the results — are false.

Klaus Wertenbroch — Written response to Data Colada posts 138 and 139, 2026, published as a PDF by Data Colada

Read directly off Wertenbroch's own two-page response, hosted at datacolada.org/wp-content/uploads/Wertenbroch-Response-to-Data-Colada-Posts-138-139.pdf and linked from Data Colada post #138 (August 31, 2026). The sentence is the fourth in the document, following: "Their forensic analysis is far more sophisticated and thorough than what researchers without their experience could have done, and the evidence of data tampering they found is convincing." It refers to the data behind Ariely & Wertenbroch (2002), “Procrastination, Deadlines, and Performance: Self-Control by Precommitment,” Psychological Science. Wertenbroch, professor of marketing at INSEAD, writes in the same document that he "never had access to any version of the data for any of the studies" and that he asked Simine Vazire, editor-in-chief of Psychological Science, to retract the article. Retraction Watch (September 3, 2026) quotes the same sentence identically from what it describes as an undated statement sent to Data Colada; Vazire confirmed to Retraction Watch that Wertenbroch contacted her on July 23. The journal retracted the paper on September 2, 2026.

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When you see the USDA mark of inspection, you can have confidence that the products have been inspected and passed – meaning that every carcass has been inspected, samples have been taken by USDA inspectors and analyzed by scientists in a USDA laboratory, and the labeling is truthful and not misleading.

Carmen Rottenberg — "Food Safety Professionals Ensure that 'What's in Your Meat' is Safe and Wholesome," USDA Food Safety and Inspection Service news release, August 29, 2018

The opening paragraph of an FSIS news release under the byline of Carmen Rottenberg, then Acting Deputy Under Secretary for Food Safety, datelined WASHINGTON, Aug. 29, 2018. One character in it is disputed and the dispute is worth stating. The FSIS web page as it stands today shows a bare space before "meaning that", with no dash; that was confirmed byte by byte in two separate Internet Archive captures of it. But the page is a lossy migration of the 2018 original — its prose contains no dash of any kind while its navigation contains seventeen, one paragraph is duplicated out of order, and a stray italic tag splits a word mid-sentence. Two contemporaneous renderings carry an en dash there instead: FSIS's own Constituent Update of Aug. 31, 2018 (fsis.usda.gov/sites/default/files/media_file/2021-04/ConstiUpdate083118.pdf), which restates the clause in the third person, and FoodNavigator's Aug. 30, 2018 report (foodnavigator.com/Article/2018/08/30/USDA-defends-rigorous-drug-residue-testing-program-in-meat/), which quotes the sentence directly and in full. The dash is printed here as the better-attested original wording. fsis.usda.gov refuses automated requests, so every FSIS document behind this entry was read through Internet Archive captures — the release on Feb. 3, 2025 and Oct. 20, 2021, the Constituent Update on Feb. 12, 2025 — rather than fetched live; the URL below is the live page a reader can open in a browser, where the dash will be missing. Quoted for the August 26, 2026 recall of Shanghai Ravioli Corporation frozen Buffalo chicken products bearing a false mark of inspection under establishment number EST. 18004, which does not have a federal grant of inspection.

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The USDA mark of inspection signifies the meat, poultry, or egg product has been inspected and that it is safe, wholesome, and properly labeled.

USDA Food Safety and Inspection Service — Attributed to @USDAFoodSafety on X, September 6, 2023

Widely repeated as FSIS's plain-English description of its mark of inspection, and the wording is consistent with the agency's standing statutory language — the FSIS page on inspection of meat products says the Federal Meat Inspection Act requires that all meat sold commercially be inspected and passed to ensure that it is safe, wholesome, and properly labeled. But this exact sentence has not been read off a source anybody can open. X serves the post only to logged-in accounts, the Internet Archive holds no capture of it, and no FSIS page found so far carries the sentence in this form; it survives only in a search-result title. That is not enough to call it checked, so it is not used as a pull quote here.

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Three fatalities which occurred among the 1,036 cases quoted in a report by Pemberton at the Mayo Clinic were caused by errors in blood-group determination.

Karl Landsteiner — "On Individual Differences in Human Blood," Nobel Lecture, December 11, 1930

Read from the lecture PDF hosted by the Nobel Foundation (nobelprize.org), the original publisher of the text. Landsteiner is citing a report by Pemberton on transfusion outcomes at the Mayo Clinic; the same passage also gives Bellevue Hospital's 1929 transfusion series (1,467 cases, two deaths, one from an incorrect blood-group determination) and Kiel's (2,300 transfusions over about five years, no fatal accidents) used in the essay.

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