Four Dissertations (1757)
“Oh, they never lie. They dissemble, evade, prevaricate, confound, confuse, distract, obscure, subtly misrepresent and wilfully misunderstand with what often appears to be a positively gleeful relish and are generally perfectly capable of contriving to give one an utterly unambiguous impression of their future course of action while in fact intending to do exactly the opposite, but they never lie. Perish the thought.”
Source: Culture series, Look to Windward (2000), Chapter 1 “The Light of Ancient Mistakes” (p. 25)
Help us to complete the source, original and additional information
Do you have more details about the quote "Oh, they never lie. They dissemble, evade, prevaricate, confound, confuse, distract, obscure, subtly misrepresent and w…" by Iain Banks?
Iain Banks 139
Scottish writer 1954–2013Related quotes
Callimachus
(-310–-240 BC) ancient poet and librarian
Epigram 14; translation from Select Epigrams from the Greek Anthology (1906), edited by J. W. Mackail, p. 171
Epigrams
“To me the meanest flower that blows can give
Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.”
William Wordsworth
(1770–1850) English Romantic poet
Intimations of Immortality Stanza 11.
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)
“In art there are tears that do often lie too deep for thoughts.”
Louis Kronenberger
(1904–1980) American critic and writer
This is a play on "Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears", the last line of William Wordsworth's "Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood" http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Ode:_Intimations_of_Immortality_from_Recollections_of_Early_Childhood.
Source: Company Manners: A Cultural Inquiry into American Life (1954), p. 28.
John F. Kennedy
(1917–1963) 35th president of the United States of America
Commencement address, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut (11 June 1962) http://millercenter.org/scripps/archive/speeches/detail/3370
1962
Context: The great enemy of the truth is very often not the lie — deliberate, contrived and dishonest — but the myth — persistent, persuasive, and unrealistic. Too often we hold fast to the cliches of our forebears. We subject all facts to a prefabricated set of interpretations. We enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought.
“People lie. Auras never lie.”
Harbhajan Singh Yogi
(1929–2004) Indian-American Sikh Yogi
The Eight Human Talents (2001)
Erich Fromm
(1900–1980) German social psychologist and psychoanalyst
Human Nature and Social Theory (1969)
Context: The most important misunderstanding seems to me to lie in a confusion between the human necessities which I consider part of human nature, and the human necessities as they appear as drives, needs, passions, etc., in any given historical period. This division is not very different from Marx’s concept of "human nature in general", to be distinguished from "human nature as modified in each historical period". The same distinction exists in Marx when he distinguishes between "constant" or "fixed" drives and "relative" drives. The constant drives "exist under all circumstances and … can be changed by social conditions only as far as form and direction are concerned". The relative drives "owe their origin only to a certain type of social organization".
Simone Weil
(1909–1943) French philosopher, Christian mystic, and social activist
Letter to her parents (1943), as quoted in the Introduction by Siân Miles
Source: Simone Weil : An Anthology (1986), p. 2
Herman Melville
(1818–1891) American novelist, short story writer, essayist, and poet
Source: Moby-Dick or, The Whale