Quotes About Lying

The most offensive is not their lying - one can always forgive lying - lying is a delightful thing, for it leads to truth - what is offensive is that they lie and worship their own lying.

If anyone accuses me of lying, I'll simply say I'm not lying, which is just an extension of the overall lying strategy.

Kids, Madison Avenue is lying to you. Your parents are lying to you. The president is lying to you.

We are lying to ourselves and to each other. Lying about what? I don't care if we're lying. I am a bad person. I don't care. I don't care what you are.

Camera lies all the time. It’s all it does is lie, because when you choose this moment instead of this moment, when you… the moment you’ve made a choice, you’re lying about something larger. Lying is an ugly word. I don’t mean lying. But any artist picks and chooses what they want to paint or write about or say. Photographers are the same.

There are people who indulge themselves in a sort of lying, which they reckon innocent, and which in one sense is so; for it hurtsnobody but themselves. This sort of lying is the spurious offspring of vanity, begotten upon folly.

Lying to ourselves is more deeply ingrained than lying to others.

Anyone who claims to be good at lying is obviously bad at lying. Thus - as a writer myself - I cannot comment on whether or not writers are exceptionally good liars, because whatever I said would actually mean its complete opposite.

A man who lies to himself, and believes his own lies becomes unable to recognize truth, either in himself or in anyone else, and he ends up losing respect for himself and for others. When he has no respect for anyone, he can no longer love, and, in order to divert himself, having no love in him, he yields to his impulses, indulges in the lowest forms of pleasure, and behaves in the end like an animal. And it all comes from lying - lying to others and to yourself.

On the whole, lying is a cheerful affair. Embellishments are intended to give pleasure. People long to tell you what they imagine you want to hear. They want to amuse you; they want to amuse themselves; they want to show you a good time. This is beyond hospitality. This is art.

Your problem is that you have been too honest for too long. Once you start doing it, lying is simpler than breathing.

The best thing about lying in bed late is that you learn to distinguish between first things and trivia, for whatever presses on you has to prove its importance before it makes you move.

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.

You only need to lose track of who you are, or who you thought you were supposed to be, so that you end up lying flat on the dirt floor basement of your heart. Do this, Jesus says, and you will live.

If agricultural land be left uncultivated, in a few years the jungle returns, and signs are not lacking that a similar danger is always lying in wait for the fields of thought, which, by the labour of three hundred years, have been cleared and brought into cultivation by men of science. The destruction of a very small percentage of the population would suffice to annihilate scientific knowledge, and lead us back to almost universal belief in magic, witchcraft and astrology.

Woman is a misbegotten man and has a faulty and defective nature in comparison to his. Therefore she is unsure in herself. What she cannot get, she seeks to obtain through lying and diabolical deceptions. And so, to put it briefly, one must be on one's guard with every woman, as if she were a poisonous snake and the horned devil. ... Thus in evil and perverse doings woman is cleverer, that is, slyer, than man. Her feelings drive woman toward every evil, just as reason impels man toward all good.

The highest perfection of politeness is only a beautiful edifice, built, from the base to the dome, of ungraceful and gilded forms of charitable and unselfish lying.

I don't think homosexuality is a choice. Society forces you to think it's a choice, but in fact, it's in one's nature. The choice is whether one expresses one's nature truthfully or spends the rest of one's life lying about it.

I was driven to Whipsnade one sunny morning. When we set out I did not believe that Jesus Christ is the son of God, and when we reached the zoo I did. Yet I had not exactly spent the journey in thought. Nor in great emotion. “Emotional” is perhaps the last word we can apply to some of the most important events. It was more like when a man, after a long sleep, still lying motionless in bed, becomes aware that he is now awake.

Their house had real hardcover books in it, and you often saw them lying open on the sofa, the words still warm from being read.

So it's not a matter of the military lying to the press, but it's the job of the military to deny the press any information that will provide aid and comfort to the enemy.

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.'

We went to a remote Panda Base which was insane because inside there were several cribs which held about twenty baby pandas. They were all different sizes and they were all lying there in a long row. It was so cute, I could hardly stand it. I wanted to take them all home with me.

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.

Keep it up, wise guy. I'm always going to be taller than you once you're lying unconscious on the ground.

You don't write about the horrors of war. No. You write about a kid's burnt socks lying in the road.

Lying is a terrible vice, it testifies that one despises God, but fears men.

money-making is like a god possessing a priest. He never will leave you, until he has occupied you, wholly changed the order of your being, and seared you through and up and down. Then only would he eventually leave you, but nothing of you except an exhausted wreck, lying prone and wondering who are you.

If someone's lying, are their pants really on fire

No one knows what capacities for doing and suffering he has in himself, until something comes to rouse them to activity: just as in a pond of still water, lying there like a mirror, there is no sign of the roar and thunder with which it can leap from the precipice, and yet remain what it is; or again, rise high in the air as a fountain. When water is as cold as ice, you can have no idea of the latent warmth contained in it.

A man who knows a thing, recognizes a given danger, and sees with his own eyes the possibility of a remedy, damned well has the duty and the obligation not to work 'silently', but to stand up openly against the evil and for its cure. If he does not do so then he is a faithless, miserable weakling who fails either from cowardice or from laziness and incompetence....Every last agitator who possesses the courage to defend his opinions with manly forth-rightness, standing on a tavern table among his adversaries, accomplishes more than a thousand of these lying, treacherous sneaks.

With old liars who have been acting all their lives there are moments when they enter so completely into their part that they tremble or shed tears in earnest, although at that very moment, or a second later, they are able to whisper to themselves, "You know you are lying, you shameless old sinner! You're acting now, in spite of your 'holy' wrath.

True enough, nature has endowed me with a fair measure of patience and composure, yet I should be lying if I told you that, having seen the reporter off on his way to make his deadline, I fell peacefully asleep.

Who will mourn the passing of our magnificent kangaroos? Who will remember how the bush once danced in rhythm with the thumping, jumping kangaroos who flew over fences their great tails drumming on the earth? Who will remember the big red male kangaroo lying in the desert sun, his coat almost indistinguishable from the red earth from which he came?

People who are having a love-sex relationship are continuously lying to each other because the very nature of the relationship demands that they do, because you have to make a love object of this person, which means that you editorialize about them. You cut out what you don't want to see, you add this if it isn't there. And so therefore you're building a lie.

I would lying if I said I would laugh in the face of death.

The bonds between ourselves and another person exists only in our minds. Memory as it grows fainter loosens them, and notwithstanding the illusion by which we want to be duped and which, out of love, friendship, politeness, deference, duty, we dupe other people, we exist alone. Man is the creature who cannot escape from himself, who knows other people only in himself, and when he asserts the contrary, he is lying.

Thou art an heyre to fayre lying, that is nothing, if thou be disinherited of learning, for better were it to thee to inherite righteousnesse then riches, and far more seemly were if for thee to haue thy Studie full of bookes, then thy pursse full of mony.

Any good relationship that I've had with an actor has always been so emotional and personal. If you don't have that then you're just lying.

As William Gibson says, the future is already here but it's lumpy. It's unevenly distributed. Some people are already living this, the ones on low-lying islands off the coast of India are being swept away, you know, it's already happening to some people. We happen to be very lucky so far.

With actors, all our ages are out there for all to see - you can't hide anything, really. And it's kind of a relief. This is my age, this is what I look like without makeup on - who cares? That youth culture - that lying about your age - it's all denial of death anyway.

If I tell you I'm good, probably you will say I'm boasting. But if I tell you I'm not good, you'll know I'm lying.

No, we don't accomplish our love in a single year as the flowers do; an immemorial sap flows up through our arms when we love. Dear girl, this: that we loved, inside us, not One who would someday appear, but seething multitudes; not just a single child, but also the fathers lying in our depths like fallen mountains; also the dried-up riverbeds of ancient mothers-;also the whole soundless landscape under the clouded or clear sky of its destiny -; all this, my dear, preceded you.

I call a lie: wanting not to see something one does see, wanting not to see something as one sees it... The most common lie is the lie one tells to oneself; lying to others is relatively the exception.

... I am not afraid of priests. They have tried upon me all their various batteries of pious whining, hypocritical canting, lying and slandering. I have contemplated their order from the Magi of the East to the Saints of the West and I have found no difference of character, but of more or less caution, in proportion to their information or ignorance on whom their interested duperies were to be played off. Their sway in New England is indeed formidable. No mind beyond mediocrity dares there to develop itself.

Science is what we do to keep us from lying to ourselves