Can You Handle the Truth? Trivia Quiz

Answer: "A lie can travel half way around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes."

If you're looking for quotations about truth, Mark Twain (born Samuel Langhorne Clemens) seems to be your man. The one about not having to remember appears in his 1894 notebook; the one about economizing is from "Following the Equator: Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar"; and the slightly patronizing one about the ladies is from "A Double-Barreled Detective Story".

In addition to the three quotations listed, he also said, "Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; truth isn't" and "Never tell the truth to people who are not worthy of it." Over twenty other Twain quotations about truth can be documented. But, although it may be something he dropped into a conversation at one time or another, the attribution to Mark Twain of the quotation about truth putting on its shoes is NOT the truth! "The Yale Book of Quotations" cites British evangelist Charles H. Spurgeon in 1859 as saying, "A lie will go around the world while truth is pulling its boots on" and quotes an American newspaper item in 1820 as saying, "Falsehood will fly from Maine to Georgia, while truth is pulling her boots on." It also gives a nod to Jonathan Swift who - in "The Examiner" in 1710 - used a similar personification: "Falsehood flies, and the truth comes limping after it." Baptist preacher C.H. Spurgeon was called the "Prince of Preachers", Jonathan Swift - also a clergyman - is best known for his bitter satire targeted toward most of humanity, and Mark Twain's barbs directed toward religionists is legend.

It would be interesting to compare how their versions of "the truth" might have differed!

Answer: Winston Churchill

I have learned on Fun Trivia that if I don't know the correct answer and "Winston Churchill" is one of the possibilities, it's a good bet to pick him. He also is supposed to have said, "There are a lot of lies going around .... and half of them are true." Writing about the quotation in our question, a web site called "Quote Investigator" cites the first print source as "Reader's Digest" in 1942, which attributed a similar comment to Churchill, but had it being directed toward a specific person rather than human kind in general.

He apparently spoke the words in conversation around 1936 as a dig at a political opponent, Stanley Baldwin, himself a former Prime Minister.

Answer: Oscar Wilde

The quotation continues: "Modern life would be very tedious if it [truth] were either [pure or simple], and modern literature a complete impossibility!" Oscar Wilde's comedy "The Importance of Being Earnest" is all about pretense and deception. It also plays on the contrast between triviality and earnestness. Jack's beloved, Gwendolen, insists that she will only marry a man named Ernest.

As it turns out - after a series of farcical revelations about his origins - Jack Worthing's actual name is Ernest, so his fiction is inadvertently the truth.

In "The Nightingale and the Rose" Wilde also wrote "If you want to tell people the truth, make them laugh, otherwise they'll kill you." And in "The Critic as Artist" he wrote, "Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth."

Answer: J.K. Rowling

Ironically, a fiction is embedded in the name of the author of the Harry Potter series, since her name is simply Joanne Rowling, and she is more comfortable with "Jo" - her nickname. As most readers know, editors wanted her to use initials because they did not know if boys would read a book written by an author who was obviously female.

She borrowed the middle initial "K" from her Grandmother, Kathleen. Dumbledore speaks his words about the dangers of truth near the end of the first novel - "Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone" - when Harry, lying in the hospital wing of his school after being attacked, wants to know the truth about his family and the reasons behind Voldemort's hatred.

Answer: Virginia Woolf

The quotation about truth is from "The Moment and Other Essays" published in 1948. It might remind the reader at first glance of a line from William Shakespeare's "Hamlet" (Act 1, scene 3) when old Polonius advises his college son Laertes, "And this above all: to thine ownself be true, / And it must follow, as the night the day, / Thou canst not then be false to any man." But Polonius is spouting empty rhetoric, since knowing ourselves doesn't necessarily stop us from lying to others; that is, it doesn't actually "follow" logically, and Shakespeare and the audience know that, although the character does not. So we get irony. Woolf, on the other hand, gets it turned around right: if you want to write the truth about others, you have to face it in yourself first. Aside from her ground-breaking stream of consciousness fiction, Virginia Woolf may be known best for the long essay "A Room of One's Own" from 1929, in which she imagines "Shakespeare's sister" who possesses all the gifts of the famous male poet but does not have the freedom, time, or space to write.

In one of her most famous (and misquoted) lines, Woolf writes, "I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman". She argues, "A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction".

Answer: Gloria Steinem

The New Testament verse is John 8:32, in which Jesus tells his closest followers that if they keep on doing what he has told them to do, "You will know the truth, and the truth will set you free." Freedom is conditional, based on becoming fully immersed in the words they have heard and acting on them. Both Mark Twain (who at one time or another is supposed to have said practically everything) and American President James Garfield have been misquoted as saying, "The truth will set you free, but first it will make you miserable"; however, this variation has not been found in print earlier than 1981.

In his 1996 "Infinite Jest" David Foster Wallace offers the version, "The truth will set you free. But not until it is finished with you." According to an article in "The Chicago Tribune" Gloria Steinem used her variation in a speech accepting a leadership award in 2005, following up with an elaboration: "I want to speak here in favor of anger.

It's an energy source. You can tap into it." There's nothing passive or accepting in any of the aphorisms about truth setting one free, including the original words of Jesus.

The truth in each of these cases involves active engagement with reality. Of course, how reality and truth get defined is a whole other matter.

Answer: Mahatma Gandhi

Gandhi went on to say, "There have been tyrants and murderers, and for a time, they can seem invincible, but in the end, they always fall. Think of it--always." Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi came to be called "Mahatma" - meaning "great soul" - because of his teachings about nonviolent ways of making the world a better place for all human beings.

His method of social action was called "satyagraha" or "devotion to truth" - using peaceful demonstrations, civil disobedience, boycotts, and other nonviolent resistance to effect changes in government policy. Gandhi had a great influence on leaders of the American Civil Rights Movement, especially Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Answer: Arthur Conan Doyle

Written near the end of the 19th century, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's novel "The Sign of Four" contains one of the most quoted bits of dialogue in mystery literature. Sherlock Holmes demonstrates to his friend Dr. Watson that the process of elimination will eventually lead the investigator to the truth, however unlikely that truth may seem.

The saying appears in some form or another in several of Arthur Conan Doyle's short stories, and the premise behind it drives most of the Sherlock Holmes narratives.

This is classical deductive reasoning, and it works on a mathematical level, assuming you have control of all the variables and have determined all the possibilities to be impossible. It works most of the time in medical diagnoses. But might there be possibilities you haven't considered, including simpler alternatives? Are you even asking the right questions? Is there something wrong with your underlying assumptions? Logicians call the quotation the "Holmsian fallacy", and it has been pointed out that while the character Sherlock Holmes always solves the mystery, his creator Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was taken in by spiritualists and little girls who imagined fairies at the bottom of their garden.

But Holmes is much admired. In a "Star Trek" movie, the character Spock seems to claim Sherlock Holmes as an ancestor, quoting this saying. In "Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency" Douglas Adams's character takes issue with Holmes by going in the less logical direction: "Sherlock Holmes observed that once you have eliminated the impossible, then whatever remains, however improbable, must be the answer. I, however, do not like to eliminate the impossible."

Answer: Flannery O'Connor

Flannery O'Connor's thirty-two short stories and two novels fall into a literary genre usually termed "Southern Gothic", and her characters have been called "grotesque" because they are drawn with an exaggerated mix of comedy and monstrosity. She wrote numerous book reviews, focusing on deep theological issues, from a Roman Catholic perspective.

Her correspondence was collected in "The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor" published in 1988, edited by Sally Fitzgerald. As she often did, O'Connor was talking about religious faith when she wrote the sentence about truth not changing, and here she was specifically addressing the existentialist ideas of Jean-Paul Sartre, arguing that "the very notion of God's existence is not emotionally satisfying" but the discomfort people feel about that doesn't make God any less real.

She goes on to say, "A higher paradox confounds emotion as well as reason and there are long periods in the lives of all of us, and of the saints, when the truth as revealed by faith is hideous, emotionally disturbing, downright repulsive." O'Connor argues that humans are drawn to God, not because of our emotional responses to truth, but in spite of them.

Answer: Pablo Picasso

According to the 1980 book "Picasso: Fifty Years of His Art" by Alfred H. Barr, Jr., Picasso made the statement about art and truth in Spanish to Marius de Zayas, who wrote it down, then got Pablo Picasso's permission to translate and publish it in 1923 under the title "Picasso Speaks." Picasso was referring specifically to his modern paintings, explaining that he did not get involved in researching his subjects: "When I paint, my object is to show what I have found and not what I am looking for." Rather than trying to represent nature, Picasso argued for the separation of art and nature, saying, "Through art we express our conception of what nature is not." I'm not sure why this reminds me of the 1820 poem "Ode on a Grecian Urn" by John Keats with its final lines "Beauty is truth, truth beauty.' - that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know." Maybe the two are opposites? Maybe, not. Truth, beauty, art are abstract words, and their meanings are hard to pin down.

Their ambiguity may explain why there are so many quotations about them.