Lies Quotes

Can we actually suppose that we are wasting, polluting, and making ugly this beautiful land for the sake of patriotism and the love of God? Perhaps some of us would like to think so, but in fact this destruction is taking place because we have allowed ourselves to believe, and to live, a mated pair of economic lies: that nothing has a value that is not assigned to it by the market; and that the economic life of our communities can safely be handed over to the great corporations. (from 'Compromise, Hell!' published in the November/December 2004 issue of ORION magazine)

~ Wendell Berry

When I consider Life, 'tis all a cheat;Yet, fooled with hope, men favour the deceit;Trust on, and think to-morrow will repay:To-morrow's falser than the former day;Lies worse; and while it says, we shall be blestWith some new joys, cuts off what we possesst.

~ John Dryden

You can't lie a lifetime,son. Either you gon' tell the truth, or the truth's gon' tell on you

~ Daniel Black

When someone you loved was depending on your lie, it was perfectly easy.

~ Liane Moriarty

Arraigned at my own bar, Memory having given her evidence of the hopes, wishes, sentiments I had been cherishing since last night-- of the general state of mind which I have indulged for nearly a fortnight past; Reason having come forward and told in her own quiet way , a plain, unvarnished tale, showing how I had rejected the real, and rabidly devoured the ideal;-- I pronounced judgment to this effect:-- That a greater fool than Jane Eyre had never breathed the breath of life: that a more fantastic idiot had never surfeited herself on sweet lies, and swallowed the poison as if it were nectar.

~ Charlotte Brontë

I would lie of course. I lied a lot and with good reason: to protect the truth—safeguard it like wearing fake gems to keep the real ones from getting stolen or cheapened by overuse. I guarded what truths I possessed because information was not a thing—it was colorless odorless shapeless and therefore indestructible. There was no way to retrieve or void it no way to halt its proliferation. Telling someone a secret was like storing plutonium inside a sandwich bag the information would inevitably outlive the friendship or love or trust in which you’d placed it. And then you would have given it away.

~ Jennifer Egan

When the world is pregnant with lies, a secret long hidden will be revealed.

~ Mark Mirabello

Dallas, is it remotely possible for you to carry on a conversation that's not loaded down with manure?

~ Susan Elizabeth Phillips

Maximus was cleaning his blade on the dead man’s wolfskin. ‘You promised him his life,’ the Greek said. ‘No, I said death was his last worry.’ Maximus swung up on to Pale Horse. ‘Is that not so for all of us?

~ Harry Sidebottom

And what if we’d been utterly open? Made jokes about the first wife? What if we’d been that kind of family? Well, I would have been different, surely. But not because I knew the secret. For it wasn’t the secret—the secret that wasn’t a secret anyway—that led to the austerity in our lives. It was the austerity that led to the secret. And what I had been marked by, probably most of all, was the austerity. It had made secrets in my life too. Or silences, anyway, that became secrets. That became lies.

~ Sue Miller

We have all at one time been stranded on islands shouting lies across the seas of misunderstanding, hoping the fog will carry our mischief to the distant ports in people’s minds.

~ Shannon L. Alder

a thing may happen and be a total lie, another thing may not happen and be truer then the truth

~ Leah Wilson

Lies can make harsh truths less painful. But I believe pain is essential for growth.

~ Morgan Rhodes

For about four years, I’ve been telling people I hate sour cream. One time I sent back nachos because they had sour cream on them. I started saying this because a friend I admire hates sour cream. I told him I hated it too so we could have a funny thing in common.

~ Megan Boyle

If we're told that human ain't the highest among creatures,then it'd be difficult to raise human dignity into current level.

~ Toba Beta

All drama is about lies. All drama is about something that’s hidden. A drama starts because a situation becomes imbalanced by a lie. The lie may be something we tell each other or something we think about ourselves, but the lie imbalances a situation. If you’re cheating on your wife the repression of that puts things out of balance; or if you’re someone you think you’re not, and you think you should be further ahead in your job, that neurotic vision takes over your life and you’re plagued by it until you’re cleansed. At the end of a play the lie is revealed. The better the play the more surprising and inevitable the lie is. Aristotle told us this

~ David Mamet

You're the one saying how vital offing these kids and grabbing their brat is to the war effort, right? Well, I'm telling you I need way more cash to do it right, so--Lying.How have you not murdered that creature by now?Oh, I've tried.

~ Brian K. Vaughan

Lying is a thriving vocation.

~ Susanna Centlivre

I will cut taxes - cut taxes - for 95 percent of all working families, because, in an economy like this, the last thing we should do is raise taxes on the middle class.

~ Barack Obama

Secret is the mother of all lies.

~ Toba Beta

And the bummer thing is, ghosts never leave. They might leave you alone sometimes, but they're always there deep down, whispering lies in your ear. They echo the lies others told you: That you're not smart enough; that you're not pretty; that you'll never amount to anything.

~ Josh Shipp

Not if you like lies so much you want to live one

~ Mike A. Lancaster

The brain is unreliable. It relies on lies.

~ Brian Spellman

Mankind ain't special, Kiddo.It's just you who wanna be so.

~ Toba Beta

It’s not that fact of him telling me he’s not going to kill me that assures me I’ve got some time to breathe. Predo could look me in the eye and tell me whiskey’s good and cigarettes are better and I’d still need a drink and a Lucky to believe he’s not lying. The man breeds lies. He spawns them asexually, with no need for any assistance. He exhales and lies fill the air. Alone in a room, he mutters lies to himself to keep from falling into the trap of truth-telling. In the day, sleeping in his bed, deep in the safest heart of Coalition headquarters, he dreams in lies. The better to keep his left hand from knowing what betrayals his right has planned.Stretched on the rack and burned with hot irons, Dexter Predo will be in no danger of revealing the truth. Living so far beyond its borders.

~ Charlie Huston

A tiny company, ‘the aware’, we have taken up civilization’s fiercest weapons to fight against the dark army of the masses whose leaders are hunger and stupidity. These weapons are the smile and the lie.

~ Iwan Goll

Once you take to the habit of deception, every new lie comes that much easier. Though to me it wasn't so much lies as a matter of judicious editing. We all inevitable present a version of ourselves that is a collection of half-truths and exclusions. The way I saw it, the truth was too complicated, whereas the well-chosen lie would put everyone's mind at ease.

~ Caroline Kettlewell

And when all was said and done the lies a fellow told about himself couldn't probably hold a proverbial candle to the wholesale whoppers other fellows coined about him.

~ James Joyce

Because if we were all created idealists, then life was bound to be one relentless disappointment. But then, there was also music. We unlearned the lies with one hand and repeated them with the other.

~ Nikolai Grozni

You must not let me out,' it warned him gently, as it saw his eyes rest on the lock.'If you release me now that I know my nature, I could not help but unmake the enchantment of the mirrors. You see, they are tame now and they show only what people want and need to see in them. The wildness of them is bound up in my form, though I did not know it for a long time. If I were uncaged, I could not help but tear at the enchantment until I was unnamed. Then I would fly into all of the mirrors and windows and into shining footpaths after rain. The mirrors would become wild and they would be absolutely, utterly truthful. Everything would be seen for what it truly was. My laughter would greet every lie and every pretense. It would rumble like a volcano under the smooth surface of everything. You can imagine the chaos it would cause here, for those who dwell in the greylands do so because the mirrors are tamed. If I were free, people would come to be afraid of them. They would cease to believe in their reflections and eventually they would no longer believe in themselves. No, laughter must remain caged here.

~ Isobelle Carmody

Francie was ten years old when she first found an outlet in writing. What she wrote was of little consequence. What was important was that the attempt to write stories kept her straight on the dividing line between truth and fiction. If she had not found this outlet in writing, she might have grown up to be a tremendous liar.

~ Betty Smith

During the Senate debate on the intervention in Iraq, Sen. Clinton made considerable use of her background and 'experience' to argue that, yes, Saddam Hussein was indeed a threat. She did not argue so much from the position adopted by the Bush administration as she emphasized the stand taken, by both her husband and Al Gore, when they were in office, to the effect that another and final confrontation with the Baathist regime was more or less inevitable. Now, it does not especially matter whether you agree or agreed with her about this (as I, for once, do and did). What does matter is that she has since altered her position and attempted, with her husband’s help, to make people forget that she ever held it. And this, on a grave matter of national honor and security, merely to influence her short-term standing in the Iowa caucuses. Surely that on its own should be sufficient to disqualify her from consideration?

~ Christopher Hitchens

Photography is without mercy--though it's nonsense to say it does not lie. Rather, it lies in a particular, capricious way which makes beggars of ministers and gods of cat's meat men.

~ Nick Harkaway

However imperfect our conception of virtue, still let us cling to it; for a moment’s forgetfulness exposes us to all the malignant forces from without. The simplest lie to myself, buried though it may be in the silence of my soul, may yet be as dangerous to my inner liberty as an act of treachery on the marketplace. Widfom and Destiny

~ Maurice Maeterlinck

You know,' she begins, 'you fellas ought to be looking after each other.' Her comment makes me realise that through the lies, the greatest irony is that we are looking out for each other. It's just that in the end, we're letting her down. That's what injures us.

~ Markus Zusak

Facts are threatening to those invested in fraud.

~ Dashanne Stokes

Is it really a Lie if someone is unwilling to see the Truth?

~ Soman Chainani

Sometimes more is hidden behind a truth than a pack of lies.

~ Khang Kijarro Nguyen

[B]eware trying to bend the Truth to fit your story instead of facing it head-on. That was your father's mistake. And that's how a Snake becomes a Lion and a Lion becomes a Snake. Because the more you bend the Truth to fit a story, the more it turns into Lies without you even realizing it.

~ Soman Chainani

You’re such a great liar when you lie to yourself.

~ Rebecca Mcnutt