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 struggle to end sexist oppression that focuses on destroying the cultural basis for such domination strengthens other liberation struggles. Individuals who fight for the eradication of sexism without struggles to end racism or classism undermine their own efforts. Individuals who fight for the eradication of racism or classism while supporting sexist oppression are helping to maintain the cultural basis of all forms of group oppression.
Even the holy men who lived before the coming of Christ understood that God had in mind plans of peace for the human race.
So our human life but dies down to its root, and still puts forth its green blade to eternity.
Try to be free: you will die of hunger.
I entirely concur in the propriety of resorting to the sense in which the Constitution was accepted and ratified by the nation. In that sense alone it is the legitimate Constitution.
The Greeks possessed a knowledge of human nature we seem hardly able to attain to without passing through the strengthening hibernation of a new barbarism.
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