Quotes About Honesty

Lies of omission count as lies, sweetie—they can be the worst ones.

When the lies of omission unravel, so does the story.

Things often are as they appear. First impressions matter.

I didn't try to say the penis word for Elaine. Cock, I said to her.

This prevented Elaine from making up any stories about whomever I was seeing at the time, man or woman. Therefore, no one was falsely accused of shitting in the bed.

Unrevised, real life is just a mess.

Things often are as they appear.

When you write vaguely, you are always vulnerable.

Galbraith's First Law: Modesty is a vastly overrated virtue.

Finny always said what he happened to be thinking, and if this stunned people then he was surprised.

Never say you are five feet nine when you are five feet eight and a half.

if you're dumb enough to get caught cheating, you probably don't belong on Wall Street.

Being honest may not get you a lot of friends but it'll always get you the right ones.

People think you want them to do something or say something special...you don't. You just want them to be themselves, so you can be yourself.

Well, I don't want to be king, I want to be real.

There is no weapon so disarming and effective in relations with the communists as sheer honesty. They know very little about it.

These are my confessions, and if in them I say nothing, it is because I have nothing to say.

It's a repressive society where you can't be horrible, I'm not horrible, they made me horrible, I'm just honest.

Ich sag's ihnen in's gesicht.

Part of that relationship requires political leaders to understand the truth—and to be able to handle the truth.

For if there is a single dominant lesson from 1918, it's that governments need to tell the truth in a crisis.

Despite that effort, whoever held power, whether a city government or some private gathering of the locals, they generally failed to keep the community together. They failed because they lost trust. They lost trust because they lied. (San Francisco was a rare exception; its leaders told the truth, and the city responded heroically.) And they lied for the war effort, for the propaganda machine that Wilson had created.

The foundation of morality is to have done, once and for all, with lying." A brilliant scientist, later president of the Royal Society, he advised investigators, "Sit down before a fact as a little child, be prepared to give up every preconceived notion. Follow humbly wherever and to whatever abysses nature leads, or you shall learn nothing." He also believed that learning had purpose, stating, "The great end of life is not knowledge but action.

For if there is a single dominant lesson from 1918, it's that governments need to tell the truth in a crisis. Risk communication implies managing the truth. You don't manage the truth. You tell the truth.