Quotes About Honesty

It is impossible for someone to lie unless he thinks he knows the truth. Producing bullshit requires no such conviction.

Bullshit is unavoidable whenever circumstance require someone to talk without knowing what he is talking about.

After all, every use of language without exception has some, if not all, of the characteristic features of lies.

The bullshitter ignores these demands altogether. He does not reject the authority of the truth, as the liar does, and oppose himself to it. He pays no attention to it at all. By virtue of this, bullshit is a greater enemy of the truth than lies are.

One of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much bullshit.

Is truth something that in fact we do—and should—especially care about? Or is the love of truth, as professed by so many distinguished thinkers and writers, itself merely another example of bullshit ?

However, it must not be assumed that bullshit always and necessarily has pretentiousness as its motive.

There are similarities between hot air and excrement, incidentally, which make hot air seem an especially suitable equivalent for bullshit. Just as hot air is speech that has been emptied of all informative content, so excrement is matter from which everything nutritive has been removed.

It is very hard to be a hypocrite if you aren't trained for it.

An applicant for a job who disagrees with his prospective employer is either a fool or he has convictions, and there was nothing to suggest to me that your husband was a fool.

In the beginning, the lovemaking was frequent and wild, but with little genuine feeling, like good pornography. Our true intimacy was the unspoken belief that we were living honest lives without the artifice and deceit so necessary in most relationships.

If you wipe the screen clean, you must accept the truth of what then appears.

I won't sell influence and I'm perfectly willing to be cussed if I'm right.

I never did give anybody hell. I just told the truth and they thought it was hell.

I never gave anybody hell! I just told the truth and they thought it was hell.

Nixon is one of the few in the history of this country to run for high office talking out of both sides of his mouth at the same time and lying out of both sides.

Intense feeling too often obscures the truth.

I never did give them hell. I just told the truth, and they thought it was hell.

I'm just a politician from Missouri and proud of it.

Show me a man that gets rich by being a politician, and I'll show you a crook.

Always be sincere, even if you don't mean it.

What does not corrupt a man's heart cannot corrupt his life, or do him any lasting harm.

True men cry not through their tears but their words.

Veritas, truth