Quotes About Lies

The truth may be out there, but lies are inside your head.

A man who lies is ashamed, for each lie teaches him the degradation of a world which, forcing him to lie in order to live, promptly sings the praises of loyalty and truthfulness.

The French state insists that once someone becomes French by citizenship, his ancestors become, metaphorically speaking, the Gauls, and he is therefore not to be distinguished from any other Frenchman, in statistics or anywhere else. It would take considerable conceptional subtlety as well as empirical knowledge to disentangle the truth and lies of all this.

I didn't trust men. I wanted to trust them because I knew there must be some good men in the world, but the ones I'd known had lied to my face while plotting acts of violence. Women could be bitches, but men were the ones who seemed the most capable of crimes without mercy.

Metternich told lies all the time, and never deceived any one; Talleyrand never told a lie and deceived the whole world.

There is no soul under heaven that commonly lies under the commanding power of the Word, but that soul that has an interest in the Word of Promise.

You may make as many fair speeches as you choose, but you lie.

The lies (Western slander) which well-meaning zeal has heaped round this man (Muhammad) are disgraceful to ourselves only.

What is negotiation but the accumulation of small lies leading to advantage?

'Movement' sounded like Joy Division, but 'Power, Corruption & Lies' is the first New Order record.

People lie, and they always are very very creative in finding new ways to lie.

Facts are facts, and fiction is fiction, and a lie doesn't become truth just because it appears on the front page of the newspaper.

After a while, you have no idea how old you are because you've lied so many times.

Neither the SPLC, the liberal media, nor the Democratic Party has any authority on what constitutes 'hate.' They themselves are full of lies and hatred. They have no love.

On the whole, though, the guests at the party preferred the narrative about lies, fear, stupidity and racism. They had lost an argument, and they never lost arguments. They were confused and angry.

The foreign policy establishment depends unabashedly on lies.

But it also had many large posters with messages of a more peaceful nature. These extolled the country's economic achievement since the Cultural Revolution, which was supposed to have liberated the forces of production and increased productivity. Of course, the Cultural Revolution had done just the opposite. Official lies like this, habitually indulged in and frequently displayed by the authorities, served no purpose except to create the impression that truth was unimportant.

Convictions are more dangerous foes of truth than lies.

Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies.

There's an awful lot you can find in the press. If you do what you really ought to do, start by reading every article from the end, back to the front; most of the lies are up in the front. Turns out there's a lot of stuff back there.

The picture of the world that's presented to the public has only the remotest relation to reality. The truth of the matter is buried under edifice after edifice of lies upon lies. It's all been a marvellous success from the point of view in deterring the threat of democracy, achieved under conditions of freedom, which is extremely interesting.

The ritual denunciation of the so-called 'socialist' states is replete with distortions and often outright lies.

Then he quotes Hannah Arendt from her book The Origins of Totalitarianism: "The result of a consistent and total substitution of lies with factual truth is not that the lie will now be accepted as truth and truth be defamed as a lie, but that the sense by which we take our bearings in the real world—and the category of truth versus falsehood is among the mental means to this end—is being destroyed" (quoted in Hedges 2017).

It is the responsibility of intellectuals to speak the truth and to expose lies. This, at least, may seem enough of a truism to pass without comment. Not so, however. For the modern intellectual, it is not at all obvious.