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It is unfortunate, considering that enthusiasm moves the world, that so few enthusiasts can be trusted to speak the truth.
-Arthur Balfour
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Matilda told such dreadful lies,
It made one gasp and stretch one's eyes;
Her aunt, who from her earliest youth,
Had kept a strict regard for truth,
Attempted to believe Matilda:
The effort very nearly killed her.
-Hilaire Belloc, Cautionary Tales, 1907
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People never lie so much as after a hunt, during a war or before an election.
-Otto von Bismarck
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A truth that's told with bad intent
Beats all the lies you can invent.
-William Blake, Auguries of Innocence
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Thought is generally considered to be a sober and weighty business. But here it is being suggested that creative play is an essential element in forming new hypotheses and ideas. Indeed, thought which tries to avoid play is in fact playing false with itself. Play, it appears, is the very essence of thought.
This notion of falseness that can creep into play of thought is shown in the etymology of the words illusion, delusion, and collusion, all of which have as their Latin root ludere, "to play." So illusion implies playing false with perception; delusion, playing false with thought; collusion, playing false together in order to support each other's illusions and delusions. When thought plays false, the thinker may occasionally recognize this fact, and express it in the above words.
[co-authored with F. David Peat]
-David Bohm, Science, Order, and Creativity
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Any fool can tell the truth, but it requires a man of some sense to know how to lie well.
-Samuel Butler
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And after all, what is a lie? ’T is but
The truth in masquerade.
-Lord (George Gordon) Byron, Don Juan. Canto xi. Stanza 37
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The justification for those actions was that we were living in a very hard, predatory, "cloak-and-dagger" world and that the only way to deal with a totalitarian enemy was to intimidate him. The trouble with this theory was that while we live in a world of plot and counterplot, we also live in a world of cause and effect. Whatever the cause for the decision to legitimize and regularize deceit abroad, the inevitable effect was the practice of deceit at home.
-Norman Cousins, Pathology of Power
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The fox when it sees a flock of herons or magpies or birds of that kind, suddenly flings himself on the ground with his mouth open to look as he were dead; and these birds want to peck at his tongue, and he bites off their heads.
-Leonardo DaVinci, note book
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The mole has very small eyes and it always lives under ground; and it lives as long as it is in the dark but when it comes into the light it dies immediately, because it becomes known;--and so it is with lies.
-Leonardo DaVinci, note book
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"There are lies, damned lies, and statistics."
Often attributed to Mark Twain; Quoted in Mark Twain, Autobiography, ch. 29, (1924), his exact words were: ‘The remark attributed to Disraeli would often apply with justice and force: “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics”.’
-Benjamin Disraeli
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Semiotics is concerned with everything that can be taken as a sign. A sign is everything which can be taken as significantly substituting for something else. This something else does not necessarily have to exist or to actually be somewhere at the moment in which a sign stands in for it. Thus semiotics is in principle the discipline studying everything which can be used in order to lie. If something cannot be used to tell a lie, conversely it cannot be used to tell the truth; it cannot in fact be used 'to tell' at all. I think that the definition of a 'theory of the lie' should be taken as a pretty comprehensive program for a general semiotics.
-Umberto Eco, Theory of Semiotics, 1976
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Whoever undertakes to set himself up as judge in the field of truth and knowledge is shipwrecked by the laughter of the Gods.
-Albert Einstein
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"None are so hopelessly enslaved, as those who falsely believe they are free. The truth has been kept from the depth of their minds by masters who rule them with lies. They feed them on falsehoods till wrong looks like right in their eyes."
-Johann von Goethe
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All this was inspired by the principle--which is quite true in itself--that in the big lie there is always a certain force of credibility; because the broad masses of a nation are always more easily corrupted in the deeper strata of their emotional nature than consciously or voluntarily; and thus in the primitive simplicity of their minds they more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie, since they themselves often tell small lies in little matters but would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods. It would never come into their heads to fabricate colossal untruths, and they would not believe that others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously. Even though the facts which prove this to be so may be brought clearly to their minds, they will still doubt and waver and will continue to think that there may be some other explanation. For the grossly impudent lie always leaves traces behind it, even after it has been nailed down, a fact which is known to all expert liars in this world and to all who conspire together in the art of lying. These people know only too well how to use falsehood for the basest purposes.
-Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, chapter X "Why The Second Reich Collapsed"
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"Those in possession of absolute power can not only prophesy and make their prophecies come true, but they can also lie and make their lies come true."
-Eric Hoffer
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"I went to Washington to challenge the soft bigotry of low expectations,” the president said in his campaign for reelection in September 2004. “It’s working. It’s making a difference.” It is one of those deadly lies, which, by sheer repetition, is at length accepted by large numbers of Americans as, perhaps, a rough approximation of the truth. But it is not the truth, and it is not an innocent misstatement of the facts. It is a devious appeasement of the heartache of the parents of the poor and, if it is not forcefully resisted and denounced, it is going to lead our nation even further in a perilous direction.
-Jonathan Kozol, The Shame of the Nation, September, 2005
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It is only in lies, wholeheartedly and bravely told, that human nature attains through words and speech the forbearance, the nobility the romance, the idealism, that it falls so short of in fact and in deeds.
-Clare Boothe Luce
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The men the American people admire most extravagantly are the most daring liars; the men they detest most violently are those who try to tell them the truth.
-H. L. Mencken
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Not that you lied to me but that I no longer believe you - that is what has distressed me.
-Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, maxim #183
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Man demands truth and fulfills this demand in moral intercourse with other men; this is the basis of all social life. One anticipates the unpleasant consequences of reciprocal lying. From this there arises the duty of truth. We permit epic poets to lie because we expect no detrimental consequences in this case. Thus the lie is permitted where it is considered something pleasant. Assuming that it does no harm, the lie is beautiful and charming.
-Friedrich Nietzsche
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By the time you swear you're his,
Shivering and sighing,
And he vows his passion is
Infinite, undying -
Lady, make a note of this:
One of you is lying.
-Dorothy Parker, Unfortunate Coincidence
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There wasn't any more truth in over half of what any so-called orator said. If it wasn't a "Deliberate Lie," why it was an "Exaggerated Falsehood."
-Will Rogers, November 13, 1932
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Truth is confirmed by inspection and delay; falsehood by haste and uncertainty.
-Tacitus
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"Every ambitious would-be empire, clarions it abroad that she is conquering the world to bring it peace, security and freedom, and it is sacrificing her sons only for the most noble and humanitarian purposes. That is a lie; and it is an ancient lie, yet generations still rise and believe it."
-Henry David Thoreau
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When the missionaries came to Africa they had the Bible and we had the land. They said "Let us pray." We closed our eyes. When we opened them we had the Bible and they had the land.
-Desmond Tutu
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One of the most striking differences between a cat and a lie is that a cat has only nine lives.
http://www.twainquotes.com/
-Mark Twain, Pudd'nhead Wilson
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It is the nature of ambition to make men liars and cheats, to hide the truth in their breasts, and show, like jugglers, another thing in their mouths, to cut all friendships and enmities to the measure of their own interest, and to make a good countenance without the help of good will.
-Kenneth Tynan
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“It is planned speeches that contain lies or dissimulations, not what you blurt out so spontaneously in one instant.”
-Tennessee (Thomas Lanier) Williams, Forward to Sweet Bird of Youth
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No one who has read official documents needs to be told how easy it is to conceal the essential truth under the apparently candid and all-disclosing phrases of a voluminous and particularizing report....
-Woodrow Wilson, from Congressional Government, p. 109
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Books about Deception/Lying
