Quotes about lies

The best lies have some truth in 'em ... to give 'em flavor, as it were.

All men lie when they are afraid. Some tell many lies, some but a few. Some have only one great lie they tell so often that they almost come to believe it.

Could there be honor in a lie if it were told for a ... a good purpose?

"... [W]hen you've known me longer, you'll learn that I mean everything I say."

"Even the lies?"

"Especially the lies."

I have come to believe, based on long experience dealing with humans, that no true story ever gets told.

I sit here now with two stories, about to add lies, half-truths, or simple misunderstandings of my own, moved by some vague urge toward a completeness of things—a completion that can never be achieved.

A reliable way to make people believe in falsehoods is frequent repetition, because familiarity is not easily distinguished from truth.

The problem is, only a few people get to be scientists. You see the dilemma? Given the choice between a truth they can appreciate and a lie they can live, most people will take you-know-what.

‘Lies are just a poor man's pennies,’ Violet told her.

You’re abbreviating heavily, not lying. That’s what you tell yourself.

His mind reeled. Now, empowered to ask questions of utmost rudeness-and promised answers-he could, conceivably (though it was almost unimaginable), ask someone, some adult, his father perhaps: "Do you lie?" But he would have no way of knowing if the answer he received was true.

He walked around the Las Vegas casino incredulous at the spectacle before him: seven thousand people, all of whom seem delighted with the world as they found it. A society with deep, troubling economic problems had rigged itself to disguise those problems, and the chief beneficiaries of the deceit were its financial middlemen. How could this be?

She lies like the moon lies, a different face every night, all but one of them false, and the one true face as barren and hard as stone. Why do you believe her?