quotations about lies and lying
It is not the lie that passeth through the mind, but the lie that sinketh in, and settleth in it, that doth the hurt.
FRANCIS BACON
Essays
By repetition, each lie becomes an irreversible fact upon which other lies are constructed.
JOHN LE CARRÉ
Absolute Friends
And, after all, what is a lie?
'Tis but The truth in masquerade.
LORD BYRON
Don Juan
A lie stands on one leg, truth on two.
BENJAMIN FRANKLIN
Poor Richard's Almanack
The perjurer's mother told white lies.
AUSTIN O'MALLEY
Keystones of Thought
If we live all our lives under lies, it becomes difficult to see anything if it does not have anything to do with these lies. If it is, for example, true or, say, honest.
AMIRI BARAKA
Home: Social Essays
Who has a daring eye tells downright truths and downright lies.
JOHANN KASPAR LAVATER
Aphorisms on Man
He who makes an assertion without knowing whether it is true or false, is guilty of falsehood; and the accidental truth of the assertion, does not justify or excuse him.
ABRAHAM LINCOLN
letter to Allen N. Ford, August 11, 1846
Lying is a crime the least liable to variation in its definitions. A child will upon the slightest temptation tell an untruth as readily as the truth. That is, as soon as he can suspect that it will be to his advantage; and the dread that he afterward has of telling a lie is acquired principally by his being threatened, punished, and terrified by those who detect him in it, till at length, a number of painful impressions are annexed to the telling of an untruth, and he comes even to shudder at the thought of it.
JOSEPH PRIESTLEY
The Theological and Miscellaneous Works of Joseph Priestley
Most people will accept a likely lie to an unlikely truth. In fact, they prefer it.
LAURELL K. HAMILTON
Guilty Pleasures
Women scheme when they are weak, they lie out of fear. Men scheme when they are strong, they lie out of arrogance.
JULIAN BARNES
Flaubert's Parrot
Given that you'll never hear the truth out of anyone's mouth, you must listen to the lies--the specific lies they choose to tell.
CATHERYNNE M. VALENTE
Radiance
It was easier to lie with a gesture than a word.
SAMUEL R. DELANY
Babel-17
Glorify a lie, legalize a lie, arm and equip a lie, consecrate a lie with solemn forms and awful penalties, and after all it is nothing but a lie. It rots a land and corrupts a people like any other lie, and by and by the white light of God's truth shines clear through it, and shows it to be a lie.
E. H. CHAPIN
Living Words
Why, lies are like a sticky juice overspreading the world, a living, growing flypaper to catch and gum the wings of every human soul ... And the little helpless buzzings of honest, liberal, kindly people, aren't they like the thin little noise flies make when they're caught.
JOHN DOS PASSOS
One Man's Initiation: 1917
Lying, the telling of beautiful untrue things, is the proper aim of Art.
OSCAR WILDE
"The Decay of Lying", The Works of Oscar Wilde
For my part, if a lie may do thee grace,
I'll gild it with the happiest terms I have.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
Henry IV, Part I
Who dares think one thing, and another tell,
My heart detests him as the gates of hell.
HOMER
The Iliad
Sin has many tools, but a lie is the handle which fits them all.
OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES
The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table
Nothing is rarer than a solitary lie; for lies breed like Surinam toads; you cannot tell one but out it comes with a hundred young ones on its back.
WASHINGTON ALLSTON
Lectures on Art and Poems