Dictators have an old trick to assess the strength of their opposition: they say something patently untrue, and then look to see who mindlessly repeats it. Those who do, they recognise as their true supporters.

The most useful piece of learning for the uses of life is to unlearn what is untrue.

What I had said was that as a cricketer, you have to take care of your body and look after your fitness levels, and someone altered that statement and quoted me as saying that I wanted to quit playing Test cricket. It's totally untrue, and as long as I am fit, I want to play in all formats.

I think that there have been a lot of fear-based assertions that feminism is about aggression, and that is incorrect and untrue. Feminism is about equality; that's what it's about.

The speed of communications is wondrous to behold. It is also true that speed can multiply the distribution of information that we know to be untrue.

Of all lies, art is the least untrue.

Just because you can't explain something doesn't make it untrue.

What is true is already so. Owning up to it doesn't make it worse. Not being open about it doesn't make it go away. And because it's true, it is what is there to be interacted with. Anything untrue isn't there to be lived. People can stand what is true, for they are already enduring it.

The things said most confidently by advanced persons to crowded audiences are generally those opposite to the fact; it is actually our truisms that are untrue.

Every day, hundreds of observations and experiments pour into the hopper of the scientific literature. Many of them don't have much to do with evolution - they're observations about the details of physiology, biochemistry, development, and so on - but many of them do. And every fact that has something to do with evolution confirms its truth. Every fossil that we find, every DNA molecule that we sequence, every organ system that we dissect, supports the idea that species evolved from common ancestors. Despite innumerable possible observations that could prove evolution untrue, we don't have a single one. We don't find mammals in Precambrian rocks, humans in the same layers as dinosaurs, or any other fossils out of evolutionary order. DNA sequencing supports the evolutionary relationships of species originally deduced from the fossil record. And, as natural selection predicts, we find no species with adaptations that only benefit a different species. We do find dead genes and vestigial organs, incomprehensible under the idea of special creation. Despite a million chances to be wrong, evolution always comes up right. That is as close as we can get to a scientific truth.

We can't believe what we believe to be untrue, and we can't love what we believe to be unreal.

When wealth flees, untrue friends follow.

Justice is the first virtue of social institutions, as truth is of systems of thought. A theory however elegant and economical must be rejected or revised if it is untrue; likewise laws and institutions no matter how efficient and well-arranged must be reformed or abolished if they are unjust. Each person possesses an inviolability founded on justice that even the welfare of society as a whole cannot override. For this reason justice denies that the loss of freedom for some is made right by a greater good shared by others. It does not allow that the sacrifices imposed on a few are outweighed by the larger sum of advantages enjoyed by many. Therefore in a just society the liberties of equal citizenship are taken as settled; the rights secured by justice are not subject to political bargaining or to the calculus of social interests.

No human should mislead another by promising them something they know to be untrue.

When you're young you think that you're going to sail into a lovely lake of quietude and peace. This is profoundly untrue.

The most useful piece of learning for the uses of life is to unlearn what is untrue.

The speed of communications is wondrous to behold. It is also true that speed can multiply the distribution of information that we know to be untrue.

My play Safe Sex was picked apart because critics thought it was untrue. It was a play in which no one had AIDS but the characters talked about how it was going to change their lives.

Of all lies art is the least untrue.