The easiest rationalization for the refusal to seek the truth is the denial that truth exists.
Interpretation
Denial of truth can be a convenient excuse for avoiding the search for it.
Sidney Hook highlights how individuals may refuse to pursue the truth by asserting that truth itself is nonexistent. This quote reflects the tendency of people to rationalize their inaction and intellectual laziness, choosing instead to stay within their comfort zones rather than confronting potentially uncomfortable truths.
In practice
During a debate about the importance of integrity, one might use this quote to emphasize the significance of seeking truth even when it's uncomfortable.
A liberal education will impart an awareness of the amazing and precious complexity of human relationships. Since those relationships are violated more often out of insensitiveness than out of deliberate intent, whatever increases sensitiveness of perception and understanding humanizes life.
Everyone recognizes a distinction between knowledge and wisdom. . . Wisdom is a kind of knowledge. It is knowledge of the nature, career, and consequences of human values. Since these cannot be separated from the human organism and the social scene, the moral ways of man cannot be understood without knowledge of the ways of things and institutions.
In contrast to totalitarianism, democracy can face and live with the truth about itself.
Tolerance always has limits - it cannot tolerate what is itself actively intolerant.
Idealism, alas, does not protect one from ignorance, dogmatism, and foolishness.
The mob that hails the man on horseback, the Caesars and conquering heroes, does not retain its freedoms for long.
The Bible is literature, not dogma.
If, indeed, a firearm were more dangerous to its possessors than to potential aggressors, would it not make sense for the government to arm all criminals, and let them accidentally shoot themselves? Is this absurd? Yes, and yet the government, of course, is arming criminals.
The root of disaster means a star coming apart, and no image expresses better the look in a patient's eyes when hearing a neurosurgeon's diagnosis.
All men are by nature born equally free and independent.
God felt, God tasted and enjoyed is indeed God, but God with those gifts which flatter the soul, God in darkness, in privation, in forsakenness, in sensibility, is so much God, that he is so to speak God bare and alone. Shall we fear this death, which is to produce in us the true divine life of grace?
When the Way governs the world, the proud stallions drag dung carriages. When the Way is lost to the world, war horses are bred outside the city.
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