Quotes about lies

“They lied!”

“Of course they lied. They’re politicians, it’s what they do.”

Children's lies are signs of great talent.

[U]ntruths are thieves, robbing us of a birthright.

Ignorance and deception can’t save anybody. Knowing saves them.

Finally, speech and truth exclude one another. And in fact this is just what brings up, in the age of fixed language, the typical "judge of men," who is all race and knows how to take the being that is speaking. To look a man keenly in the eyes, to size up the speaker behind the stump speech or the philosophical discourse, to know behind the prayer the heart, and behind the common good-tone the more intimate levels of social importance—and that instantaneously, immediately, and with the self-evident certainty that characterizes everything cosmic—that is what is lacking to the real Taboo-man, for whom one language at any rate carries conviction. A priest who is also a diplomat cannot be genuinely a priest. An ethical philosopher of the Kant stamp is never a "judge of men."

The man who lies in his verbal utterances betrays himself, without observing it, in his demeanour. One who uses demeanour to dissimulate with betrays himself in his tone. It is precisely because rigid speech separates means and intent that it never carries it off with the keen appraiser. The adept reads between the lines and understands a man as soon as he sees his walk or his handwriting. The deeper and more intimate a spiritual communion, the more readily it dispenses with signs and linkages through waking-consciousness. A real comradeship makes itself understood with few words, a real faith is silent altogether. The purest symbol of an understanding that has again got beyond language is the old peasant couple sitting in the evening in front of their cottage and entertaining one another without a word's being passed, each knowing what the other is thinking and feeling. Words would only disturb the harmony. From such a state of reciprocal understanding something or other reaches back, far beyond the collective existence of the higher animal-world, deep in the primeval history of free-moving life. Here deliverance from the waking-consciousness is, at moments, very nearly achieved.

There is not a person in this courtroom who has never told a lie, who has never done an immoral thing, and there is no man living who has never looked upon a woman without desire.

Dissimulation is the refuge of the slave.

It's a sad day when the government no longer has to cover up its dishonesty because the American media does it for them...This is the state of the corporate media today. It's a symptom of what we call the access of evil: journalists trading truth for access. The public unwittingly mistakes the illusion of news for reality.

Each day a few more lies eat into the seed with which we are born, little institutional lies from the print of newspapers, the shock waves of television, and the sentimental cheats of the movie screen.

Indeed, until she had met Lev at school, it had not occurred to her that anyone might prefer to speak a plain fact rather than a lie that sounded well. People said what suited their purposes, when they were serious; and when they weren’t serious, they talked without meaning anything at all.

Obsessed with tricking the girl, he had fallen into the trap he laid for her. Bitterly he recognised that he was always believing his own lies, caught in nets he had elaborately woven.

Predictions are uttered by prophets (free of charge); by clairvoyants (who usually charge a fee, and are therefore more honored in their day than prophets); and by futurologists (salaried). Prediction is the business of prophets, clairvoyants, and futurologists. It is not the business of novelists. A novelist’s business is lying.