Quotes about lies

Lies are neither bad nor good. Like a fire they can either keep you warm or burn you to death, depending on how they're used. [...] The truth was that we were standing at what might be the twilight of our species and that truth was freezing a hundred people to death every night. They needed something to keep them warm. And so I lied, and so did the President, and every doctor and priest, every platoon leader and every parent. "We're going to be okay." That was our message. That was the message of every other filmmaker during the war. [...] There's a word for that kind of lie. Hope.

Some problems could not be fixed with a lie.

“Falsehoods serve nobody, Kadash,” Dalinar said, pulling back. “If the Almighty is dead, then pretending otherwise is pure stupidity. We need real hope, not faith in lies.”

It wasn’t a lie. It was a different truth.

Truth may be stranger than fiction, goes the old saw, but it is never as strange as lies. (Or, for that matter, as true.)

How do you get away with it? Above all, how do you persuade people to risk their lives in order to kill total strangers whom they know almost literally nothing about? Why, the answer’s simple. You lie to them!

“I can at least comfort myself with the idea that whatever I’ve done I’ve helped to nail a lie, and I’m coming to think that lying is among the worst of all human failings. Next to actual killing. And experience has made us almost equally good at both of them.”

“I have killed many people and seen many more killed on my orders,” Jogajong said. “It is what must be paid to buy what we want.”

“What we’ve been told we want, by liars more skilled than ourselves.”

"Love makes us liars. The Seelie Queen told me that. So don't judge me for lying about how I feel. You do it too."

Nothing has been falsified—except the impression that it gives.

A well-wrapped statistic is better than Hitler's "big lie"; it misleads, yet it cannot be pinned on you.

The English are polite by telling lies. The Americans are polite by telling the truth.

You take the lies out of him, and he'll shrink to the size of your hat; you take the malice out of him, and he'll disappear.