Quotes About Lying

We all spend so much time not saying what we want, because we know we can't have it. And because it sounds ungracious, or ungrateful, or disloyal, or childish, or banal. Or because we're so desperate to pretend that things are OK, really, that confessing to ourselves they're not looks like a bad move. Go on, say what you want. ... Whatever it is, say it to yourself. The truth will set you free. Either that or it'll get you a punch in the nose. Surviving in whatever life you're living means lying, and lying corrodes the soul, so take a break from the lies for just one minute.

No theory ever benefited by the application of data, Amy. Data kills theories. A theory has no better time than when it's lying there naked, pure, unsullied by facts. Let's just keep it that way for a while." "So you don't really have a theory?" "Clueless." "You lying bag of fish heads." "I can fire you, you know. Even if Clay was the one that hired you, I'm not totally superfluous to this operation yet. I'm kind of in charge. I can fire you. Then how will you live?" "I'm not getting paid." "See, right there. Perfectly good concept ruined by the application of fact.

The only difference between a dead skunk lying in the road and a dead lawyer lying in the road is that there are skid marks around the skunk.

When I was a kid, I got in trouble for lying a lot, and I had a teacher say, instead of lying, write it down, because if you write it down, it's not a lie anymore; it's fiction.

That’s the secret to performance: conviction. The right note played tentatively still misses its mark, but play boldly and no one will question you. If one believes there is truth in art – and I do – then it’s troubling how similar the skill of performing is to lying. Maybe lying is itself a kind of art. I think about that more than I should.

If someone's lying about something small, you don't know what else they're lying about. I'm a big girl, I can handle the truth - even if it's not good news.

Jace,” she said. “Why are you doing this to me?” “Because you’re lying to me. And you’re lying to yourself.” Jace’s eyes were blazing, and even though his hands were stuffed into his pockets, she could see that they were knotted into fists.

Ask any guy if sex is important in a relationship and the one who says no is lying. I just haven't met that guy yet. When you meet him, let's get him in to the Smithsonian - he's that special and rare.

There was a distinction between lying and telling half-truths, but it was a very narrow one.

Keep right on lying to me. That's what I want you to do.

there simply is no way to describe the past without lying. Our memories are not like fiction. They are fiction.

When I left law school, I wanted to go into the government, into the tax policy area. I got the job that I wanted in the International Tax Council's office in Treasury. I arrived determined to change the world. But I discovered very quickly that the world couldn't care less. And I couldn't stomach the lying and stealing that I witnessed. I realized that the only difference between my mother's family and the senators and administrators that I was working with was that the latter wore suits and ties.

When I went off to the army when I was 17 years old, I believed in America and the rights of freedom. But today I believe my government is lying to the American people and that my president, George Bush, is a criminal.

If we were to abandon concern for what is true, what is false, and what remains indeterminate, the world would be totally chaotic. Even those who deny the importance of truth, on the one hand, are quick to jump on anyone who is caught lying.

diplomacy, n.: The patriotic art of lying for one's country.

If you had told me I'd be making 62 tomorrow, I'd say you were lying.

The story goes that I first had the idea for The HitchHiker's Guide to the Galaxy while lying drunk in a field in Innsbruck.

With Clinton, there's no question that I would have made fun of his out-and-out lying. But he's also a good friend.

You find out the strength of a wind by trying to walk against it, not by lying down.

Ninety-nine hundredths or, possibly, nine hundred and ninety-nine thousandths of our activity is purely automatic and habitual, from our rising in the morning to our lying down each night.

I'll burn myself, or I'll cut myself. For a burn or a cut might be shown, might be nursed, might scar or heal, would be a miserable kind of emblem; would anyway be there, on the surface of her body, rather than corroding it from within. Now the thought came to her again, that she might scar herself in some way. It came, like the solution to a problem: I won't be doing it like some hysterical girl. I won't be hoping she'll come catch me at it. It won't be like lying on the sitting-room floor. I'll be doing it for myself, as a secret.

I carried Rudy softly through the broken street...with him I tried a little harder at comforting. I watched the contents of his soul for a moment and saw a black-painted boy calling the name Jesse Owens as he ran through an imaginary tape. I saw him hip-deep in some icy water, chasing a book, and I saw a boy lying in bed, imagining how a kiss would taste from his glorious next-door neighbor. He does something to me, that boy. Every time. It's his only detriment. He steps on my heart. He makes me cry.

When my job was attempting to predict future economic developments for the Shell oil company, I was frequently reminded of an Arabic saying: 'Those who claim to foresee the future are lying, even if by chance they are later proved right.'

Only a crisis - actual or perceived - produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes the politically inevitable.

To abstain from lying is essentially wholesome.

It's hard to give a dramatic shape to even the most dramatic life. . . . you are forced not just into selectivity, but into alteration, distortion and outright lying about what did and didn't happen.

Our law enforcement agencies have found bodies in the desert, either buried or just lying out there, that have been beheaded.

In my younger days I struggled constantly with an overwhelming but pure love affair - my only one, and I would have struggled with it longer had not premature death, bitter but salutary for me, extinguished the cooling flames. I certainly wish I could say that I have always been entirely free from desires of the flesh, but I would be lying if I did.

If you meet somebody who says he or she has never dreamed of flying, I don't believe you. I mean, they're lying.

We all choke, and the man who says he doesn't choke is lying like hell.

Only a person with the true heart of a dictionary-writer would be lying in bed, three days after being stabbed in the gut, worrying about his P's.

I visualize myself winning the Olympic Pentathlon, inventing a phone that can be controlled by brain waves, or doing the laundry. I do not actually DO these things, but I see myself doing them, and that is almost MORE satisfying, because I am also lying down.

Diabolical error decks itself out with ease in lying colors with some appearance of truth, so that the force of pronouncement is corrupted by a very brief addition or change, and the confession of faith which should have resulted in salvation, by a subtle transition leads to death!

My doctor asked me how many golf balls I had hit in my career. I'm lying there in bed calculating somewhere between four and five million golf balls I had hit to do that on my body.

It is a rule of mine never to ask unsolicited questions of people over twenty-one. I am only giving them the option of lying if they choose to. They would tell me the truth without my asking if they wanted me to know. To me that's fair enough.

I can see her lying back in her faded dress in a room where do what you don't confess.

He liked to think that Heaven was what each person wanted it to be. He could see no future in lying around on a fluffy white cloud and listening to somebody playing on a harp, a picture of Heaven he had seen numerous times in one form or another. Even if it was that way, his personal preference would have run more to the fiddle.

This is the lying thieving mother who cut me $500,000.

When my mother died, my father was in a crisis, my sister was in a crisis, everyone was in a crisis. I went round the night my mother was lying in the kitchen, and I organised everything, from the undertaker to the funeral... I looked after everybody, I sorted it all out and Ive done so ever since.

I'm all out o faith, this is how I feel. I'm cold and I am shamed lying naked on the floor. Illusions never change into something real. I'm wide awake and I can see the perfect sky is torn. You're a little late, I'm already torn.

In the first few pages, Kundera discusses several abstract historical figures: Robespierre, Nietzsche, Hitler. For Eunice's sake, I wanted him to get to the plot, to introduce actual "living" characters - I recalled this was a love story - and to leave the world of ideas behind. Here we were, two people lying in bed, Eunice's worried head propped on my collarbone, and I wanted us to feel something in common. I wanted this complex language, this surge of intellect, to be processed into love. Isn't that how they used to do it a century ago, people reading poetry to one another?

There never has been a period of history, in which the Common Law did not recognize Christianity as lying at its foundation.

Man is the creature that cannot emerge from himself, that knows his fellows only in himself; when he asserts the contrary, he is lying.

Let me tell you, never before in the history of this planet has anybody made the progress that African-Americans have made in a 30-year period, in spite of many black folks and white folks lying to one another.

There's hostility to lying, and there should be.

Part of what I feel is that the so-called bad fairies are really only there to get you to pay some attention. They trick you up until you're lying flat on your back and you literally have another point of view. They're about loosening up being rigid. They trip you over to break the barrier between you and the world. So their so-called "badness" actually can be quite instrumental in helping you with things.

One time we stayed at a B&B, and there were a couple of hippies who had this nice little area and they let us sleep in their beds that they had in the back.Then the woman suggested we go out and lie on some cushions and look up at the stars and look for UFOs and she said, "You know, I do this all the time," and I was like, "Okay..." So there we are, lying there next to this amazing loch, and we're looking up in the stars and I don't really know what I was expecting, but to see some sort of metallic object.

Honesty . . . is the foundation upon which relationships and many societies are built. Without it . . . there can be no trust. Widespread lying destroys the fabric of democratic societies, in which the necessary assumption is that people mostly tell the truth.