“Sometimes you have to lie. But to yourself you must always tell the truth.”
Louise Fitzhugh book Harriet the Spy
Source: Harriet the Spy
Source: V for Vendetta
“Sometimes you have to lie. But to yourself you must always tell the truth.”
Louise Fitzhugh book Harriet the Spy
Source: Harriet the Spy
“When you want something bad, you'll tell yourself a thousand lies.”
Jodi Picoult book Sing You Home
Source: Sing You Home
“If you do not tell the truth about yourself you cannot tell it about other people.”
Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) English writer
"The Leaning Tower", lecture delivered to the Workers' Educational Association, Brighton (May 1940)
The Moment and Other Essays (1948)
Richard Dawkins book A Devil's Chaplain
And if they can't give you a good answer, I hope you'll think very carefully before you believe a word they say.
"Good and Bad Reasons for Believing" [open letter to his daughter]
A Devil's Chaplain (2003)
Pietro Aretino (1492–1556) Italian author, playwright, poet, satirist, and blackmailer
Source: The Works of Aretino: Biography: de Sanctis. The letters, 1926, p. 152
Eliezer Yudkowsky Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality
Harry Potter in Ch. 65 http://www.fanfiction.net/s/5782108/65/Harry_Potter_and_the_Methods_of_Rationality <br class="br">Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality (2010 - 2015) <br class="br">Context: Lies propagate, that’s what I’m saying. You’ve got to tell more lies to cover them up, lie about every fact that’s connected to the first lie. And if you kept on lying, and you kept on trying to cover it up, sooner or later you’d even have to start lying about the general laws of thought. Like, someone is selling you some kind of alternative medicine that doesn’t work, and any double-blind experimental study will confirm that it doesn’t work. So if someone wants to go on defending the lie, they’ve got to get you to disbelieve in the experimental method. Like, the experimental method is just for merely scientific kinds of medicine, not amazing alternative medicine like theirs. Or a good and virtuous person should believe as strongly as they can, no matter what the evidence says. Or truth doesn’t exist and there’s no such thing as objective reality. A lot of common wisdom like that isn’t just mistaken, it’s anti-epistemology, it’s systematically wrong. Every rule of rationality that tells you how to find the truth, there’s someone out there who needs you to believe the opposite. If you once tell a lie, the truth is ever after your enemy; and there’s a lot of people out there telling lies.