Quote of the Day (Damon Linker, on a Destructive ‘Authoritarian Outlook’)

“Setting aside the question of whether an authoritarian outlook is harmful in religion, and there is a considerable religious and philosophical literature on the subject, an authoritarian outlook can certainly be destructive in politics. A nation in which such an outlook is explicitly encouraged and esteemed will be tempted to support political leaders who promise to shield us from the inherent complexity and difficulty of truth itself. This temptation is especially dangerous in liberal democratic nations, which depend on citizens informing themselves about exceedingly complicated issues, making use of alternative sources of information, doubting the assertions of public authorities, and thrashing out an inevitably tentative truth in open-ended argument and debate. This is the unavoidable price of citizenship in a free society. It is our citizenly duty to be suspicious, and to cultivate suspicion, of any and all who would rescue us from the rigors of our own freedom.”— American journalist and author Damon Linker, “Without a Doubt” (review of Richard John Neuhaus’ “Catholic Matters”), The New Republic, Apr. 3, 2006

Spiritual Quote of the Day (Dr. Michael Chan, on Moses, Truth, and National Memory)

“The future of a people depends on the truthfulness of their memory. A forgetful nation is a fragile nation. Moses urged the people to remember the good, the bad and the ugly. Moses said that remembrance precedes promise. We have our own Jordan to cross. We need to reconnect with all our history to see how we got here. There is so much to celebrate, to repair and to be done.” —Dr. Michael Chan, executive director for faith and learning at Concordia College, in an address at the Chautauqua Institution in upstate New York, July 12, 2026, quoted by Mary Lee Talbot, “Quality of Our Future Dependson the Quality of Our Memory, Says Michael Chan,” The Chautauquan Daily, July 13, 2026

Quote of the Day (Thomas Paine, on ‘The Irresistible Nature of Truth’)

“But such is the irresistible nature of truth, that all it asks—and all it wants—is the liberty of appearing.”—English-born American pamphleteer and patriot Thomas Paine (1737-1809), The Rights of Man (1791)

Quote of the Day (Susan Sontag, on ‘The Writer’s First Job’)

“The writer’s first job is not to have opinions but to tell the truth…and refuse to be an accomplice of lies or misinformation. Literature is the expression of nuance and contrariness against the voices of simplification. The job of the writer is to make it harder to believe the mental despoilers. The job of the writer is to help make us see the world as it is, which is to say, full of many different claims and parts and experiences.”— American critic, novelist, filmmaker, philosopher, teacher, and political activist Susan Sontag (1933-2004), “In Jerusalem,” The New York Review of Books, June 21, 2001

Spiritual Quote of the Day (St. Teresa of Avila, on Truth)

“Never affirm anything unless you are sure it is true.” — Spanish nun, mystic and reformer St. Teresa of Avila (1515-1582), Maxims for Her Nuns, in Complete Works of St. Teresa of Avila: Vol.3 (1963) edited by E. Allison Peers

Quote of the Day (Erasmus, on Leaders, Flatterers and the Truth)

“Yet in the midst of all their prosperity, princes in this respect seem to me most unfortunate, because, having no one to tell them truth, they are forced to receive flatterers for friends.” — Dutch monk and scholar Desiderius Erasmus (1469-1536), In Praise of Folly (1509)

Quote of the Day (Albert Camus, on Truth, Freedom, and Justice)

“In a world whose absurdity appears to be so impenetrable, we simply must reach a greater degree of understanding among men, a greater sincerity. We must achieve this or perish. To do so, certain conditions must be fulfilled: men must be frank (falsehood confuses things), free (communication is impossible with slaves). Finally, they must feel a certain justice around them.” —French novelist, essayist, and playwright—Nobel Literature laureate—Albert Camus (1913-1960), “Three Interviews,” in Lyrical and Critical Essays, edited by Philip Thody, translated by Ellen Conroy Kennedy (1970)

The loss to the world when Albert Camus died in an automobile accident 65 years ago today is incalculable. At only 46 years old, he was still in the prime of his career.

His death came at a tricky time for the novelist: France’s divisive, debilitating attempt to crush the independence movement of the colony where Camus was born and spent his formative years, Algeria. As a pacifist, he was so anguished by the Algerian War that he said it affected him “as others feel pain in their legs.”

Like his counterpart across the English Channel, George Orwell, Camus issued a clarion call for liberal democracy when it was threatened by totalitarian regimes of both the left and the right. The successors of these two writers are issuing their own warnings about similar perils that confront our age, but so far they are going unheeded.

Maybe it’s time to re-read Camus, to understand, as he demonstrated in his postwar novel The Plague (much discussed at the outbreak of COVID-19), that withstanding pestilences, whether the medical or political kind, requires eternal vigilance lest they return, but ordinary people must maintain their resistance, no matter how great their weariness.

(For a more extended overview of how Camus balanced political activism with engaging with time “on the smallest and most personal scale,” see Maria Popova’s June 2024 post from her blog “The Marginalian.”)

Quote of the Day (Charles Dickens, on ‘Real Love and Truth’)

“I hope that simple love and truth will be strong in the end. I hope that real love and truth are stronger in the end than any evil or misfortune in the world.”—English novelist Charles Dickens (1812-1870), David Copperfield (1850)

Quote of the Day (Steve Tesich, on ‘A Time of Post-Truth and Post-Art’)

“This new era is a time of post-truth and post-art. Truth and art don’t exist anymore because man has been diminished. The artist today is a clown, an entertainer. I fight against this image, and I would rather die than become the same. Art is the only religion for me, because at least while I write I can believe in a truth. This is a hard time. It is when neither Tolstoy nor Dostoevsky are read. All the conditions exist, except the most important ones, for man to become a human being.”—Oscar-winning Serbian-born American screenwriter (Breaking Away), playwright, and novelist Steve Tesich (1942-1996), interviewed by Dejan Stojanovic, “A Few Moments with Steve Tesich,” Views, April 1992

The image of Steve Tesich accompanying this post was taken in front of the Goodman Theatre in Chicago, 1991, by Marko Rakocevic.

Spiritual Quote of the Day (St. Augustine of Hippo, on Rejecting Truth)

“Why, then, doth truth beget hatred and that man of thine, preaching the truth, become an enemy unto them, whereas a happy life is loved, which is naught else but joy in the truth; unless that truth is loved in such a sort as that those who love aught else wish that to be the truth which they love, and, as they are willing to be deceived, are unwilling to be convinced that they are so? Therefore do they hate the truth for the sake of that thing which they love instead of the truth. They love truth when she shines on them, and hate her when she rebukes them. For, because they are not willing to be deceived, and wish to deceive, they love her when she reveals herself, and hate her when she reveals them.”— St. Augustine of Hippo (354-430 AD), Confessions, translated by J. G. Pilkington (1943)

Spiritual Quote of the Day (St. Pope John XXIII, on ‘Contempt for Truth’)

“All the evils which poison men and nations and trouble so many hearts have a single cause and a single source: ignorance of the truth — and at times even more than ignorance, a contempt for truth and a reckless rejection of it. Thus arise all manner of errors, which enter the recesses of men’s hearts and the bloodstream of human society as would a plague. These errors turn everything upside down: they menace individuals and society itself.”—St. Pope John XXIII (1881-1963), Ad Petri Cathedram (“To the Chair of Peter”), “On Faith, Unity and Peace in a Spirit of Charity,” released June 29, 1959

Ad Petri Cathedram, released 65 years ago yesterday, was the first encyclical issued by John XXIII after he was elected pope. Though it didn’t set out any doctrines, it did sound what would become the pontiff’s characteristic note of pastoral concern.

I could not help but read the sentences I’ve quoted with a shock of recognition. Pope John called on members of the media to “to disseminate, not lies, error, and obscenity, but only the truth; they are particularly bound to publicize what is conducive to good and virtuous conduct, not to vice.”

Moreover, this gentle pontiff sounds downright prophetic in warning what can happen when rulers wantonly disregard truth and liberty:

“The harmonious unity which must be sought among peoples and nations also needs ever greater improvement among the various classes of individuals. Otherwise mutual antagonism and conflict can result, as we have already seen. And the next step brings rioting mobs, wanton destruction of property, and sometimes even bloodshed. 

Quote of the Day (Ralph Ellison, on the Truth)

“Few men love the truth or even regard facts so dearly as to let either one upset their picture of the world. Poor Galileo, poor John Jasper; they persecuted one and laughed at the other, but both were witnesses for the truth they professed. Maybe it's just that some of us have had certain facts and truths slapped up against our heads so hard and so often that we have to see them and pay our respects to their reality.”—American novelist and essayist Ralph Ellison (1913-1994), Juneteenth (1999)

Spiritual Quote of the Day (Albert Schweitzer, on ‘The Spirit Generated by Truth’)

“One belief of my childhood I have preserved with the certainty that I can never lose it: belief in truth. I am confident that the spirit generated by truth is stronger than the force of circumstances. In my view no other destiny awaits mankind than that which, through its mental and spiritual disposition, it prepares for itself. Therefore I do not believe that it will have to tread the road to ruin right to the end."—Nobel Peace Prize-winning surgeon, missionary, and humanitarian Albert Schweitzer (1875-1965), Out of My Life and Thought: An Autobiography, translated by C.T.  Campion (1931) 

Quote of the Day (John Steinbeck, on the ‘Slow, Eating Agony of a Lie’)

“The quick pain of truth can pass away, but the slow, eating agony of a lie is never lost. That's a running sore.” —American novelist and Nobel Literature laureate John Steinbeck (1902-1968), East of Eden (1952)

Quote of the Day (Abraham Lincoln, on ‘Faith in the People’)

“I have faith in the people. They will not consent to disunion. The danger is, that they are misled. Let them know the truth and the country is safe.” —President Abraham Lincoln, to the Boston (MA) Journal, July 1864, quoted in “President Lincoln Had a Presentiment of Death,” Sandusky (OH) Register, Apr. 29, 1865

Quote of the Day (Lydia Maria Child, on the Harvest of the Truth)

“No particle of scattered truth is ever wasted. The harvest will come in time.”—Poet Lydia Maria Child (1802-1880), in an 1860 letter to fellow abolitionist John Underwood, in “The Last Appeal: Lydia Maria Child's Antislavery Letters to John C. Underwood,” edited by Nancy Slocum Hornick, The Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, January 1971

Quote of the Day (Coventry Patmore, on Why ‘The World’s Course Will Not Fail’)

“For want of me the world’s course will not fail:      
When all its work is done, the lie shall rot;   
The truth is great, and shall prevail,   
When none cares whether it prevail or not.” — English poet and literary critic Coventry Patmore (1823–1896), “Magna Est Veritas,” in The Oxford Book of Victorian Verse, edited by Arthur Quiller-Couch (1922)

Quote of the Day (Karl Popper, on Confirming Preconceived Notions)

“If we are uncritical we shall always find what we want: we shall look for, and find, confirmations, and we shall look away from, and not see, whatever might be dangerous to our pet theories.”— Austrian-British philosopher, academic and social commentator Sir Karl Popper (1902 –1994), The Poverty of Historicism (1957)

Quote of the Day (Albert Schweitzer, on ‘The Spirit Generated by Truth’)

“One belief of my childhood I have preserved with the certainty that I can never lose it: belief in truth. I am confident that the spirit generated by truth is stronger than the force of circumstances. In my view no other destiny awaits mankind than that which, through its mental and spiritual disposition, it prepares for itself. Therefore I do not believe that it will have to tread the road to ruin right to the end.” — Alsatian physician, theologian, humanitarian—and Nobel Peace Prize laureate—Albert Schweitzer (1875-1965), Out of My Life and Thought: An Autobiography, translated by Antje Bultmann Lemke (1931)

Song Lyric of the Day (Bob Seger, on Truth and Lies)

“The night came on like thunder
Lightning split the purple skies
My whole day had been a journey sorting through the truth and lies.”—American rock ‘n’ roll singer-songwriter Bob Seger, “Gates of Eden,” from his Ride Out CD (2014)