A collection of quotes on the topic of lie, truth, doing, use.
“When you have something to say, silence is a lie.”
“I didn't lie! I just created fiction with my mouth!”
“Art is the lie that enables us to realize the truth.”
“She's mad, but she's magic. There's no lie in her fire.”
Variant: she’s mad, but she’s magic.
“My lands are where my dead lie buried.”
As quoted in National Geographic Vol. CX (July-December 1956), p. 487
“The first thing a man will do for his ideal is lie”
Source: History of Economic Analysis, p. 43
“Fiction is the lie that tells the truth, after all.”
Why our future depends on libraries, reading and daydreaming (2013)
Context: We writers – and especially writers for children, but all writers – have an obligation to our readers: it's the obligation to write true things, especially important when we are creating tales of people who do not exist in places that never were – to understand that truth is not in what happens but what it tells us about who we are. Fiction is the lie that tells the truth, after all.
Other quotes, 2016
Original: (ja) 努力はウソをつく。でも無駄にはならない。
Source: Interview at the TCC Media Day in September 2016, aired 2 October 2016 in Mr．サンデーHERO’S 合体SP (Mr. Sunday Hero's Gattai Special) on Fuji TV.
“But what's real? You can't find the truth, you just pick the lie you like the best.”
“Don't use the same mouth to lie and pray to God at the same time.”
“That is not dead which can eternal lie,
And with strange aeons even death may die.”
Variant: That is not dead which can eternal lie,
And with strange aeons even death may die.
Source: The Nameless City
Source: "The Flaw in Paganism" in Death and Taxes (1931)
“If you tell a big enough lie and tell it frequently enough, it will be believed.”
Misattributed to Meryl Streep (and widely disseminated on the Internet as of August/September 2014), this quote is allegedly a translation of a text by the author José Micard Teixeira, the original of which begins (in Portuguese): "Já não tenho paciência para algumas coisas, não porque me tenha tornado arrogante..."
Misattributed
Its okay to tell a lie but believing in your own lies makes you the first victim, you become your own enemy which limits ability to think progressively towards success in life.
Quoted from his first book https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Success_and_Failure_Based_on_Reason_and_Reality, "Success and Failure Based on Reason and Reality" https://www.amazon.co.uk/SUCCESS-FAILURE-BASED-REASON-REALITY/dp/9970983903/ on Amazon, P.124 (July 2018)
“I can imagine no greater bliss than to lie about, reading novels all day.”
Source: Ten Things I Love About You
“A lie is more comfortable than doubt, more useful than love, more lasting than truth.”
[The Autumn of the Patriarch, 2006 [1976], HarperCollins, 978-0-06-088286-0, 254] translated from El Ontoño del Patriarica (1975) by Gregory Rabassa
Compare sourced quote set forth above: "The English follow the principle that when one lies, it should be a big lie, and one should stick to it."
Attributed to Goebbels in Publications Relating to Various Aspects of Communism http://books.google.com/books?id=iLAnAQAAMAAJ&q=%22If+you+repeat+a+lie+often+enough,+people+will+believe+it.%22&dq=%22If+you+repeat+a+lie+often+enough,+people+will+believe+it.%22&hl=en&sa=X&ei=U4gPUvObG4qMyQHlhYAw&ved=0CGQQ6AEwCQ (1946), by United States Congress, House Committee on Un-American Activities. No reliable source has been located, and this is probably simply a further variation of the Big Lie idea.
Variants:
If you repeat a lie often enough, people will believe it.
If you repeat a lie often enough, it becomes the truth.
If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.
If you repeat a lie long enough, it becomes truth.
If you repeat a lie many times, people are bound to start believing it.
Attributed in The Sack of Rome (2006) by Alexander Stille, p. 14, and also attributed in A World Without Walls: Freedom, Development, Free Trade and Global Governance (2003) by Mike Moore, p. 63.
Misattributed
"In my Secret Life"
Ten New Songs (2001)
Vibe "Justin Bieber on Photo Shoots, Puberty, 2Pac & Drake" http://www.vibe.com/article/justin-bieber-photo-shoots-puberty-2pac-drake, 22 July 2010
1983
Source: 1920s, "Picasso Speaks" (1923), p. 315.
“Alanna didn't approve of lying, but in a pinch a lie was sometimes better than the truth.”
Source: Alanna: The First Adventure
“Nobody even imagines how well one can lie about the state of one’s own heart.”
Source: Thirst for Love
“A lie would have no sense unless the truth were felt as dangerous.”
Source: Pedagogy of the Oppressed
Source: Revolution at the Gates: Selected Writings of Lenin from 1917
“It takes two people to make a lie work: the person who tells it, and the one who believes it.”
Source: Vanishing Acts
Source: The Canterville Ghost http://www.planetmonk.com/wilde/savile/canterville.c1.html (1887)
Source: Why I Write
Stuttgart. After 8th September 1831.
Source: "Selected Correspondence Of Fryderyk Chopin"; http://archive.org/stream/selectedcorrespo002644mbp/selectedcorrespo002644mbp_djvu.txt
1848 (quoted in Infections and Inequalities by Paul Farmer, page 1.
“A lie told often enough becomes the truth.”
Variant:
Christ for my guardianship today: against poison, against burning, against drowning, against wounding, that there may come to me a multitude of rewards;
Christ with me,
Christ before me,
Christ behind me,
Christ in me,
Christ over me,
Christ to right of me,
Christ to left of me,
Christ in lying down,
Christ in sitting,
Christ in rising up,
Christ in the heart of every person who may think of me,
Christ in the mouth of every person who may speak of me,
Christ in every eye, which may look on me!
Christ in every ear, which may hear me!
The Lorica of Patrick
“You can’t be reluctant to give up your lie and still tell the truth.”
Source: Culture and Value (1980), p. 44e
John Flory, Ch. III
Burmese Days (1934)
The Psychology of the Unconscious (1943)
“In our country the lie has become not just a moral category but a pillar of the State.”
As quoted in The Observer (29 December 1974).
“No matter how fast a lie runs, the truth will someday overtake it.”
On lies and truth - "TB Joshua Rejects Courts Findings, Insists Building Collapse Was A Sabotage" http://citifmonline.com/2015/07/10/tb-joshua-rejects-courts-findings-insists-building-collapse-a-sabotage/ Citi FM, Ghana (July 10 2015)
Source: On the Bondage of the Will (1525), p. 313-314
Lecture: "Off the Time Track" (June 1952) as quoted in Journal of Scientology issue 18-G, reprinted in Technical Volumes of Dianetics & Scientology Vol. 1, p. 418.
Można powiedzieć, że byłem gdzieś niezręczny, może nawet kogoś wsypałem, ale nie to, że byłem agentem. Nie to, że chciałem kogoś zdradzić (...) Przysięgam i niech mnie szlag trafi, jeśli kłamię.
From the IV Copernican Debate at the Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń, after Gazeta.pl http://miasta.gazeta.pl/torun/1,48723,6510083,Walesa__Przysiegam__ze_nie_bylem_agentem.html and TVN24 http://www.tvn24.pl/1,1596041,druk.html
Christus ist das Genie der Liebe, als solches der diametralste Gegenpol zum Judentum, das die Inkarnation des Hasses darstellt. … Christus ist der erste Judengegner von Format. … Der Jude ist die menschgewordene Lüge. In Christus hat er zum erstenmal vor der Geschichte die ewige Wahrheit ans Kreuz geschlagen.
Michael: a German fate in diary notes (1926)
HIStory: Past, Present & Future, Book I (1995)
. "The Rise of Lady Gaga." by Brian Hiatt, in Rolling Stone (11 June 2009): 57-61.
“La terre, elle, ne ment pas [The earth, it does not lie].”
Speech (25 June 1940), quoted in Philippe Pétain, Discours aux Français, 17 juin 1940-20 août 1944 (Paris: Albin Michel, 1989), p. 66.
"The Red Association" http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/bakunin/works/writings/ch05.htm (1870)
1900s, The Strenuous Life: Essays and Addresses (1900), National Duties
Is Truth Becoming Irrelevant to Conservatives? (December 5, 2016)
Letter to Leopold Mozart (4 April 1787), from The Mozart-Da Ponte Operas by Andrew Steptoe [Oxford University Press, 1988, ISBN 0-198-16221-9], p. 84.
in the Holocaust
Source: [Satloff, Robert, Among the Righteous: Lost Stories from the Holocaust's Long Reach Into Arab lands, PublicAffairs, 2007, 163, 9781586485108]
Source: [Laqueur, Walter, The Changing Face of Antisemitism: From Ancient Times to the Present Day, Oxford University Press, 2006, 141, 9780195304299]
Source: CBS 2 News interview (1992) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4YqB_4N6erE
Wanted, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).
The Book of Merlyn (1977)
1880s, 1884, Letter to Theo (Nuenen, Oct. 1884)
Context: I tell you, if one wants to be active, one must not be afraid of going wrong, one must not be afraid of making mistakes now and then. Many people think that they will become good just by doing no harm - but that's a lie, and you yourself used to call it that. That way lies stagnation, mediocrity.
Just slap anything on when you see a blank canvas staring you in the face like some imbecile. You don't know how paralyzing that is, that stare of a blank canvas is, which says to the painter, You can't do a thing. The canvas has an idiotic stare and mesmerises some painters so much that they turn into idiots themselves. Many painters are afraid in front of the blank canvas, but the blank canvas is afraid of the real, passionate painter who dares and who has broken the spell of 'you can't' once and for all.
Life itself, too, is forever turning an infinitely vacant, dispiriting blank side towards man on which nothing appears, any more than it does on a blank canvas. But no matter how vacant and vain, how dead life may appear to be, the man of faith, of energy, of warmth, who knows something, will not be put off so easily. He wades in and does something and stays with it, in short, he violates, "defiles" - they say. Let them talk, those cold theologians.
Better than Sex (22 August 1994)
1990s
Context: Not everybody is comfortable with the idea that politics is a guilty addiction. But it is. They are addicts, and they are guilty and they do lie and cheat and steal — like all junkies. And when they get in a frenzy, they will sacrifice anything and anybody to feed their cruel and stupid habit, and there is no cure for it. That is addictive thinking. That is politics — especially in presidential campaigns. That is when the addicts seize the high ground. They care about nothing else. They are salmon, and they must spawn. They are addicts.
Letter to Larry Callen (14 July 1958), p. 133
1990s, The Proud Highway : The Fear and Loathing Letters Volume I (1997)
Context: I find that by putting things in writing I can understand them and see them a little more objectively. … For words are merely tools and if you use the right ones you can actually put even your life in order, if you don't lie to yourself and use the wrong words.
“How many times does an angel fall?
How many people lie instead of talking tall?”
"Blackstar"
Song lyrics, Blackstar (2016)
Context: Something happened on the day he died
Spirit rose a metre and stepped aside
Somebody else took his place, and bravely cried
(I’m a blackstar, I’m a blackstar) How many times does an angel fall?
How many people lie instead of talking tall?
He trod on sacred ground, he cried loud into the crowd
(I’m a blackstar, I’m a blackstar, I’m not a gangster)
Teen activist tells Davos elite they're to blame for climate crisis, CNN https://edition.cnn.com/2019/01/25/europe/greta-thunberg-davos-world-economic-forum-intl/index.html (25 January 2019)
Cited in No One is Too Small to Make a Difference, Penguin Books, 2019, pages 17-18 (ISBN 9780141991740).
2019, World Economic Forum (January 2019)
Miles "Pudge" Halter about Alaska Young, p. 88
Looking for Alaska (2005)
“The pure soul is a pure lie.”
“It is shaming sometimes, how the body will not, or cannot, lie about emotions.”
Source: On Chesil Beach
“It’s not a lie. It’s a gift for fiction.”
Variant: In Buddhism, there is no place for using effort. Just be ordinary and nothing special. Eat your food, move your bowels, pass water and when you're tired go and lie down. The ignorant will laugh at me, but the wise will understand.
Source: Tao of Jeet Kune Do
Source: The Iceman Cometh
.
1900s
Context: Everyone is free to write and say whatever he likes, without any restrictions. But every voluntary association (including the party) is also free to expel members who use the name of the party to advocate anti-party views. Freedom of speech and the press must be complete. But then freedom of association must be complete too. I am bound to accord you, in the name of free speech, the full right to shout, lie and write to your heart’s content. But you are bound to grant me, in the name of freedom of association, the right to enter into, or withdraw from, association with people advocating this or that view. The party is a voluntary association, which would inevitably break up, first ideologically and then physically, if it did not cleanse itself of people advocating anti-party views.
“Why should we rise because 'tis light?
Did we lie down because t'was night?”
Source: Shakespeare's Sonnets
