Quotes about lies
page 14

“The man who assumes everything is a lie is at least as mistaken as the one who assumes everything is true.”

Vorkosigan Saga, Brothers in Arms (1989)

“Dear, beauteous death, the jewel of the just!
Shining nowhere but in the dark;
What mysteries do lie beyond thy dust,
Could man outlook that mark!”

Henry Vaughan (1621–1695) Welsh author, physician and metaphysical poet

"They Are All Gone," st. 5.
Silex Scintillans (1655)

Death

“Nowadays three witty turns of phrase and a lie make a writer.”

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742–1799) German scientist, satirist

D 25
Aphorisms (1765-1799), Notebook D (1773-1775)

“I’ll sing you a song of the long ago -
Seven shine the shiners, oh!
What did the Seven do way back when?
Why, they wove the Charter then!
Five for the warp, from beginning to end.
Two for the woof, to make and mend.
That’s the Seven, but what of the Nine-
What of the two who chose not to shine?
The Eighth did hide, hide all away,
But the Seven caught him and made him pay.
The Ninth was strong and fought with might,
But lone Orannis was put out of the light,
Broken in two and buried under hill,
Forever to lie there, wishing us ill.”

Garth Nix (1963) Australian fantasy writer

Source: Old Kingdom series (The Abhorsen Trilogy), Lirael: Daughter of the Clayr (2001), pp. 525-526.

Way, Light, Strong, Singing

“In the blood of Eden,
Lie the woman and the man.
With the man in the woman,
And the woman in the man.”

Peter Gabriel (1950) English singer-songwriter, record producer and humanitarian

Blood of Eden
Song lyrics, Us (1992)

“Every man will have his own criterion in forming his judgment of others. I depend very much on the effect of affliction. I consider how a man comes out of the furnace; gold will lie for a month in the furnace without losing a grain.”

Richard Cecil (clergyman) (1748–1810) British Evangelical Anglican priest and social reformer

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 9.

Affliction, Dependency

“When a labourer could no longer work, he had lost the right to live. Work was all they [the landowners] wanted from him; he was to work and hold his tongue, year in and year out, early and late, and if he could not work, why, what was the use of him? It was what he was made for, to labour and toil for his betters, without complaint, on a starvation wage. When no more work could be squeezed out of him, he was no better than a cumberer of other folk's ground, and the proper place for such as he was the churchyard, where he would be sure to lie quiet under a few feet of earth, and want neither food nor wages any more.”

Joseph Arch (1826–1919) British politician

Source: The Story of his Life Told by Himself (1898), p. 11

Food

“tire
swift swept
front
ly and lie and lane
against”

Charles Bernstein (1950) American writer

"disfrutes" http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/bernstein/books/disfrutes/ (1974), first published in 1981 by Potes & Poets Press

Lying

“It's often been observed that the first casualty of war is the truth. But that's a lie, too, in its way. The reality is that, for most wars to begin, the truth has to have been sacrificed a long time in advance.”

L. Neil Smith (1946) American writer

"Empire of Lies" Presented to the Libertarian Party of New Mexico, Albuquerque, New Mexico, 15 June 2003 http://www.ncc-1776.org/tle2003/libe228-20030622-01.html.

War, Truth, Way, Reality

“It's February the 22nd
And I can't tell a lie.”

Irving Berlin (1888–1989) American composer

Song Washington's Birthday

“Now I am prepared to maintain," said Chaffery, proceeding with his proposition, "that Honesty is essentially an anarchistic and disintegrating force in society, that communities are held together and the progress of civilisation made possible only by vigorous and sometimes even violent Lying; that the Social Contract is nothing more or less than a vast conspiracy of human beings to lie to and humbug themselves and one another for the general Good. Lies are the mortar that bind the savage individual man into the social masonry … Were I not of a profoundly indolent, restless, adventurous nature, and horribly averse to writing, I would make a great book of this and live honored by every profound duffer in the world.”

H. G. Wells book Love and Mr Lewisham

Love and Mr Lewisham (1899), Ch. 23

Books, World, Communication, Lying

“Free trade is the serial killer of American manufacturing and the Trojan Horse of World Government. It is the primrose path to the loss of economic independence and national sovereignty. Free trade is a bright shining lie.”

Patrick Buchanan (1938) American politician and commentator

2000s, Where the Right Went Wrong (2004)

World, Loss, Horse

“I always divide people into two groups. Those who live by what they know to be a lie, and those who live by what they believe, falsely, to be the truth.”

Christopher Hampton (1946) British playwright, screenwriter and film director

Don, in The Philanthropist (1969), scene 6

People, Truth, Falseness

“Solon gave the following advice: "Consider your honour, as a gentleman, of more weight than an oath. Never tell a lie. Pay attention to matters of importance."”

Diogenes Laërtius (180–240) biographer of ancient Greek philosophers

Solon, 12.
The Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers (c. 200 A.D.), Book 1: The Seven Sages

“Modern civilisation has created modern vices, modern crimes, modern virtues, austerities, and generosities. The crimes of to-day were not dreamed of a hundred years ago, any more than the sublimity of the good deeds done in our time to remedy our time’s mistakes. And between the angel and the beast of this ending century lie great multitudes of ever-shifting, ever-changing lives, neither very bad nor very good, but in all cases very different from what lives used to be in the good old days when time meant time and not money.”

Francis Marion Crawford (1854–1909) Novelist, short story writer, essayist (1854-1909)

The Novel: What It Is (1893)

Money, Dreams, Angels, Change

“Gashed with honourable scars,
Low in Glory's lap they lie;
Though they fell, they fell like stars,
Streaming splendour through the sky.”

James Montgomery (1771–1854) British editor, hymn writer, and poet

The Battle of Alexandria.
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).

Star

“I have presented the periodic table as a kind of travel guide to an imaginary country, of which the elements are the various regions. This kingdom has a geography: the elements lie in particular juxtaposition to one another, and they are used to produce goods, much as a prairie produces wheat and a lake produces fish. It also has a history. Indeed, it has three kinds of history: the elements were discovered much as the lands of the world were discovered; the kingdom was mapped, just as the world was mapped, and the relative positions of the elements came to take on a great significance; and the elements have their own cosmic history, which can be traced back to the stars.”

Peter Atkins (1940) British chemist

Preface
Periodic Kingdom (1995)

World, Travel, History, Star

“Grove quotes me – and the quotes are things I actually said! That is stunningly rare. … What liberals normally do in response to a principled conservative argument is lie, manufacture quotes, and call conservatives names – as some dissolute drunk did in the New York Post a few days later. The left's logic deficit is a topic I explore thoroughly in my book. Buy it and prepare to have your blood run hot.
Oh, and for the record, Howard Kurtz is wrong about the reason I call him the Liberal Ombudsman for Liberal Media Bias in my book – it was not the "girly-boy" quote. Paradoxically, that is the ONLY time Kurtz has quoted me accurately.”

Ann Coulter (1961) author, political commentator

Mentioning comments by journalist Howard Kurtz about his reporting of Coulter calling editors at National Review Online "girly-boys".
2002, Ann Coulter : Left Is 'out to Destroy the Country' (2002)

Books, Quotes, Boy, Time

“Following World War II, the Jews… The Zionists tried to present themselves as oppressed, and to have opportunities in the world. They invented a false claim. They said that Hitler, the Germans, and the Austrians burned six million Jews in crematoria - six million Jews. They tried very hard to convince the world that this issue, this lie, was true, and they succeeded.”

Ali Meshkini (1922–2007) Iranian ayatollah

Ayatollah Meshkini in Friday Sermon at Qom: The Holocaust Is a Lie https://www.kintera.org/site/apps/nlnet/content2.aspx?c=hsJPK0PIJpH&b=689705&ct=3297183 December 2005. <br class="br">2005

War, World, Falseness

“Let me tell you something. They say he lied to Congress. I can think of no better bunch of people to lie to than Congress.”

Rush Limbaugh (1951) U.S. radio talk show host, Commentator, author, and television personality

The Rush Limbaugh Show
1994-06-06
Television, quoted in [The Way Things Aren't: Rush Limbaugh's Reign of Error, Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting, New Press, 1995-05-01, 105, 156584260X, 31782620]
on Oliver North

People, Thinking

“An idle man has a constant tendency to torpidity. He has adopted the Indian maxim — that it is better to walk than to run, and better to stand than to walk, and better to sit than to stand, and better to lie than to sit. He hugs himself into the notion, that God calls him to be quiet.”

Richard Cecil (clergyman) (1748–1810) British Evangelical Anglican priest and social reformer

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 345.

God

“Avenge, O Lord, thy slaughtered saints, whose bones
Lie scattered on the Alpine mountains cold;
Ev'n them who kept thy truth so pure of old
When all our fathers worshipped stocks and stones
Forget not.”

John Milton (1608–1674) English epic poet

On the Late Massacre in Piedmont (1655)

Truth, Mountain, Forgetting

“Language is an abominable misunderstanding which makes up a part of matter. The painters and the physicists have treated matter pretty well. The poets have hardly touched it. In March 1958, when I was living at the Beat Hotel, I proposed to Burroughs to at least make available to literature the means that painters have been using for fifty years. Cut words into pieces and scramble them. You'll hear someone draw a bow-string. Who runs may read, To read better, practice your running. Speed is entirely up to us, since machines have delivered us from the horse. Henceforth the question is to deliver us from that other so-called superior animal, man. It's not worth it to chase out the merchants: their temple is dedicated to the unsuitable lie of the value of the Unique. The crime of separation gave birth to the idea of the Unique which would not be separate. In painting, matter has seen everything: from sand to stuffed goats. Disfigured more and more, the image has been geometrically multiplied to a dizzying degree. A snow of advertising could fall from the sky, and only collector babies and the chimpanzees who make abstract paintings would bother to pick one up.”

Brion Gysin (1916–1986) Canadian artist

Cut-Ups: A Project for Disastrous Success.

Literature, Idea, Birth, Question

“Art does not lie down on the bed that is made for it; it runs away as soon as one says its name; it loves to go incognito. Its best moments are when it forgets what it is called.”

Jean Dubuffet (1901–1985) sculptor from France

Quoted by Alan Magee, in Paintings, Sculpture, Graphics., Forum Gallery, New York, 2004
posthumous

Love, Art, Forgetting

“The effect if not the function of the mass media seems to lie, therefore, in the reproduction of non- transparency through transparency, in the reproduction of non-transparency of effects through transparency of knowledge.”

Niklas Luhmann (1927–1998) German sociologist, administration expert, and social systems theorist

Source: The reality of the Mass Media (2000), p. 103.

Knowledge

“A lie will gallop halfway round the world before the truth has time to pull its breeches on.”

Cordell Hull (1871–1955) American politician, U.S. Secretary of State from 1933 to 1944

Memoirs of Cordell Hull (1948), 1:220
This is a variant of similar statements attributed earlier to Mark Twain, e.g., "A lie will fly around the whole world while the truth is getting its boots on." The oldest attribution (1831) is to Fisher Ames: “falsehood proceeds from Maine to Georgia, while truth is pulling on his boots”.

Truth, World, Time, Funny

“You ask a thing ill-suited to my years, to yours both offensive and disgusting. For how can it become me, who am near forty, to write of love, or you, that are in your fifties, to read of it That is a subject which delights young minds, and demands a tender heart. Old men are as fitted to tales of love as young men are to tales of prudence. Nor is there anything uglier than old age pursuing love, but lacking strength. Certainly you will sometimes find old men in love,—loved again, never; matrons and girls alike despise old age. No man’s love will hold a woman, but his whom she has seen in the flower of his youth. And if you hear aught to the contrary, there’s a lie behind it. Indeed I know, to write of love does not beseem me, who have already passed the noonday of life and am carried on towards evening; but it dishonours you who ask no less than me who write.”

Pope Pius II book The Tale of Two Lovers

Source: The Tale of Two Lovers, 1444, p. xvii, preface (in 1933 edition)

Love, Life, Men, Youth

“There is this lie floating around that says I am supposed to be able to do life alone, without any help, without stopping to worship something bigger than myself. But I actually believe there is something bigger than me, and I need for there to be something bigger than me. I need someone to put awe inside me; I need to come second to someone who has everything figured out.”

Donald Miller book Blue Like Jazz: nonreligious thoughts on Christian spirituality

Blue Like Jazz (2003, Nelson Books)

Life, Help

“The more difficult a man's life had been before the camp, the more furiously he lied. This lie had no practical purpose; it served simply to glorify freedom. How could a man be unhappy outside the camp?”

Vasily Grossman book Life and Fate

Source: Life and Fate (1959), Chapter 2, page 5

Life, Freedom

“A human being at rest runs on 90 watts. That’s how much power you need just to lie down. And if you’re a hunter-gatherer and you live in the Amazon, you’ll need about 250 watts. That’s how much energy it takes to run about and find food. So how much energy does our lifestyle [in America] require? Well, when you add up all our calories and then you add up the energy needed to run the computer and the air-conditioner, you get an incredibly large number, somewhere around 11,000 watts. Now you can ask yourself: What kind of animal requires 11,000 watts to live? And what you find is that we have created a lifestyle where we need more watts than a blue whale. We require more energy than the biggest animal that has ever existed. That is why our lifestyle is unsustainable. We can’t have seven billion blue whales on this planet. It’s not even clear that we can afford to have 300 million blue whales.”

Geoffrey West (1940) British physicist

2010s <br class="br">Source: Jonah Lehredec. " A Physicist Solves the City http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/19/magazine/19Urban_West-t.html?pagewanted=5&_r=1," in www.nytimes.com. Dec 17, 2010.

Food, Animals

“Every time you talk to this person, you lie.”

Chuck Klosterman (1972) Author, Columnist

Chuck Klosterman IV: A Decade of Curious People and Dangerous Ideas (2006), Recognizing Your Archenemy

Time, Personality

“As I shall lie in the grave alone, so in fact I live alone.”

Anton Chekhov (1860–1904) Russian dramatist, author and physician

Note-Book of Anton Chekhov (1921)

“On thy wither’d lips and dry,
Which like barren furrows lie,
Brooding kisses I will pour,
Shall thy youthful heart restore.
(Such kind showers in autumn fall,
And a second spring recall);
Nor from thee will ever part,
Ancient Person of my Heart.”

John Wilmot, 2nd Earl of Rochester (1647–1680) English poet, and peer of the realm

A Song of a Young Lady to Her Ancient Lover, ll. 7-14.
Other

Youth, Spring, Autumn, Kiss

“Early rising, honesty, and work. There is a great difference in merit between being awakened and waking up someone else. Working in the shadows and praising others is honesty. If you do not put into practice what you hear, you will become a lie. Work on top of work, saying to yourself, ‘Just a little more, just a little bit more’; this is not greed, it is work that comes from true sincerity.”

Nakayama Miki (1798–1887) Founder of Tenrikyo

Anecdotes of Oyasama, Foundress of Tenrikyo, from Anecdote 111, "Being Awakened in the Morning," p. 94.
Anecdotes of Oyasama

Sincerity

“We know that sacrifices lie before us and that we must pay a price for the heroic act of being a vanguard nation. We leaders know that we must pay a price for the right to say that we are at the head of a people, which is at the head of the Americas. Each and every one of us must pay his exact quota of sacrifice, conscious that he will get his reward in the satisfaction of fulfilling a duty, conscious that he will advance with all toward the image of the new man dimly visible on the horizon.”

Ernesto Che Guevara (1928–1967) Argentine Marxist revolutionary

Man and Socialism in Cuba (1965)

People

“The nation has been, and is still being, eroded and hollowed out from within by the implantation of large unassimilated and unassimiliable populations—what Lord Radcliffe once in a memorable phrase called "alien wedges"—in the heartland of the state…The disruption of the homogeneous "we", which forms the essential basis of parliamentary democracy and therefore of our liberties, is now approaching the point at which the political mechanics of a "divided community"…take charge and begin to operate autonomously. Let me illustrate this pathology of a society that is being eaten alive…The two active ingredients are grievance and violence. Where a community is divided, grievance is for practical purposes inexhaustible. When violence is injected—and quite a little will suffice for a start—there begins an escalating competition to discover grievance and to remove it. The materials lie ready to hand in a multiplicity of agencies with a vested interest, more or less benevolent, in the process of discovering grievances and demanding their removal. The spiral is easily maintained in upward movement by the repetitions and escalation of violence. At each stage alienation between the various elements of society is increased, and the constant disappointment that the imagined remedies yield a reverse result leads to growing bitterness and despair. Hand in hand with the exploitation of grievance goes the equally counterproductive process which will no doubt, as usual, be called the "search for a political solution"…Indeed, attention has already been drawn publicly to the potentially critical factor of the so-called immigrant vote in an increasing number of worthwhile constituencies. The result is that the political parties of the indigenous population vie with one another for votes by promising remedy of the grievances which are being uncovered and exploited in the context of actual or threatened violence. Thus the legislature finds itself in effect manipulated by minorities instead of responding to majorities, and is watched by the public at large with a bewildering and frustration, not to say cynicism, of which the experience of legislation hitherto in the field of immigration and race relations afford some pale idea…I need not follow the analysis further in order to demonstrate how parliamentary democracy disintegrates when the national homogeneity of the electorate is broken by a large and sharp alteration in the composition of the population. While the institutions and liberties on which British liberty depends are being progressively surrendered to the European superstate, the forces which will sap and destroy them from within are allowed to accumulate unchecked. And all the time we are invited to direct towards Angola or Siberia the anxious attention that the real danger within our power and our borders imperatively demand.”

Enoch Powell (1912–1998) British politician

Speech the Hampshire Monday Club in Southampton (9 April 1976), from A Nation or No Nation? Six Years in British Politics (Elliot Right Way Books, 1977), pp. 165-166
1970s

Disappointment, Democracy, Imagination, Search

“The frame wearied with labours lies prostrate on the ground, but it is no penalty to lie down with Christ. Your limbs unbathed, are foul and disfigured with filth and dirt; but within they are spiritually cleansed, although without the flesh is defiled.”
Humi iacent fessa laboribus viscera, sed poena non est cum Christo iacere. Squalent sine balneis membra situ et sorde deformia, sed spiritaliter intus abluitur quod foris carnaliter sordidatur.

Cyprian (200–258) Bishop of Carthage and Christian writer

Letter 76; Translated by Robert Ernest Wallis. From Ante-Nicene Fathers, Vol. 5. Edited by Alexander Roberts, James Donaldson, and A. Cleveland Coxe. (Buffalo, NY: Christian Literature Publishing Co., 1886.) Revised and edited for New Advent by Kevin Knight. <http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/050676.htm>
Letters of Cyprian

Penalty, Christ

“The Nefertiti bust is one of the most popular art works in the world. It is printed on scarves and molded in necklace pendants and coffee-table miniatures. But never in my experience is the bust exactly reproduced. The copyist softens it, feminizes it and humanizes it. The actual bust is intolerably severe. It is too uncanny an object for domestic display. Even art books lie. The bust is usually posed in profile or at an angle, so that the missing left pupil is hidden or shadowed. What happened to the eye?”

Camille Paglia (1947) American writer

Source: Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990), p. 67

Books, World, Art, Coffee

“Indeed rhetoricians are permitted to lie about historical matters so they can speak more subtly.”
Quidem concessum est rhetoribus ementiri in historiis ut aliquid dicere possint argutius.

Marcus Tullius Cicero book Brutus

Brutus, 42

“O that we may all be living in such a state of preparedness, that, when summoned to depart, we may ascend the summit whence faith looks forth on all that Jesus hath suffered and done, and exclaiming, " We have waited for Thy salvation, O Lord," lie down with Moses on Pisgah, to awake with Moses in paradise.”

Henry Melvill (1798–1871) British academic

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 181.

Faith, Suffering, Waiting

“You should be proud of your profession because there's less lying in journalism than in any other profession. They lie in education, they lie in politics, they lie in banking, they lie in labor; there's liars all over the place. Sports? Full of liars. And there are liars in journalism, but if there are liars, journalism will out them.”

Gay Talese (1932) American writer

In an interview with David L. Ulin to Los Angeles Times - Gay Talese talks with David L. Ulin http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/jacketcopy/2010/10/gay-talese-talks-with-david-l-ulin.html (October 15, 2010)

Education, Lying, Sport

“The path of the PROUN does not lie within the narrowly limited, fragmented, and isolated scientific disciplines — the builder consolidates them all together in his own experimental investigation. The path of the PROUN is not the incoherent approach of separate scientific disciplines, theories, and systems, but is rather the straightforward path of learned influence over reality.”

El Lissitsky (1890–1941) Soviet artist, designer, photographer, teacher, typographer and architect

1915 - 1925, Theses on the 'PROUN': from painting to architecture' (1920)

Reality, Learning

“If going beyond the experiences of past seers and sages is so shocking, each new seer or sage in turn has done that shocking thing'Buddha, Shankara, Chaitanya, etc. all did that wicked act…. Truly, this shocked reverence for the past is a wonderful and fearful thing? After all, the Divine is infinite and the unrolling of the Truth may be an infinite process or at least, if not quite so much, yet with some room for new discovery and new statement, even perhaps new achievement, not a thing in a nutshell cracked and its contents exhausted once for all by the first seer or sage, while the others must religiously crack the same nutshell all over again, each tremblingly fearful not to give the lie to the 'past' seers and sages.”

Sri Aurobindo (1872–1950) Indian nationalist, freedom fighter, philosopher, yogi, guru and poet

October 8, 1935
India's Rebirth

Truth, Fear, Past

“Mahomet was only fourteen; had no language but his own: much in Syria must have been a strange unintelligible whirlpool to him. But the eyes of the lad were open; glimpses of many things would doubtless be taken in, and lie very enigmatic as yet, which were to ripen in a strange way into views, into beliefs and insights one day. These journeys to Syria were probably the beginning of much to Mahomet. One other circumstance we must not forget: that he had no school-learning; of the thing we call school-learning none at all.”

Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) Scottish philosopher, satirical writer, essayist, historian and teacher

1840s, Heroes and Hero-Worship (1840), The Hero as Prophet

School, Way, Learning, Forgetting

“With spots of sunny openings, and with nooks
To lie and read in, sloping into brooks.”

Leigh Hunt The Story of Rimini

The Story of Rimini

Reading

“Order is found in things working beneficially together. It is not the forced condition of neatness, tidiness, and straightness all of which are, in design or energy terms, disordered. True order may lie in apparent confusion; it is the acid test of entropic order to test the system for yield. If it consumes energy beyond product, it is in disoder. If it produces energy to or beyond consumption, it is ordered.”

Bill Mollison (1928–2016) Australian permaculturist

Source: Permaculture: A Designers' Manual (1988), chapter 2.9

“Swift blazing flag of the regiment,
Eagle with crest of red and gold,
These men were born to drill and die.
Point for them the virtue of slaughter,
Make plain to them the excellence of killing
And a field where a thousand corpses lie.”

Stephen Crane (1871–1900) American novelist, short story writer, poet, and journalist

Do Not Weep, Maiden, For War is Kind, p. 4
War Is Kind and Other Lines (1899)

Men

“So if despite that, Hitler prepared war, he perpetrated the greatest lie and betrayal in the world. This trial clearly shows that Hitler did just that. I have no hesitation to state very clearly that Hitler was a liar and a betrayer on a mammoth scale. Even without the death of the 5 million extermination camp victims, Hitler would still go down in history as the greatest villain that ever lived.”

Hans Fritzsche (1900–1953) German Nazi official

To Leon Goldensohn, April 6, 1946, from "The Nuremberg Interviews" - by Leon Goldensohn, Robert Gellately - History - 2004

Death, War, World, History

“Some words hide the truth. Just as torture can be named enhanced interrogation, and logging of old-growth forests is named the Healthy Forest Initiative, words that lie about prostitution leave people confused about the nature of prostitution and trafficking. The words "sex work" make the harms of prostitution invisible.”

Melissa Farley (1942) American psychologist

Prostitution, Trafficking, and Cultural Amnesia (2006)

People, Truth, Sex, Nature

“Choose a community to live in whose efforts lie in the same direction as your own and where there will be interest in your activities. Instead of living in conflict with your family, who in your opinion do not understand you, and in the conflict destroying your happiness and that of others, seek out friends who think as you do. If you are religious, live among believers; if you are a revolutionary, live among your own kind. You can still try to convince the skeptical, and in this you will have the support of those who are in agreement with you.”

André Maurois (1885–1967) French writer

Un Art de Vivre (The Art of Living) (1939), The Art of Happiness

Happiness, Family, Communication, Understanding

“Love had he found in huts where poor men lie;
His daily teachers had been woods and rills,
The silence that is in the starry sky,
The sleep that is among the lonely hills.”

William Wordsworth (1770–1850) English Romantic poet

Song at the Feast of Brougham Castle, l. 161 (1807).

Love, Men, Sleep, Silence

“motherland cradle me
close my eyes
lullaby me to sleep
keep me safe
lie with me
stay beside me
don't go, don't you go”

Natalie Merchant (1963) American singer-songwriter

Song lyrics, Motherland (2001), Motherland

Sleep

“She gave the lie to the European superstition - chiefly a missionary superstition - that the women of the East are downtrodden.”

Anthony Burgess (1917–1993) English writer

Fiction, The Enemy in the Blanket (1958)

Women

“It may be that the Greeks had it easy, with their light and their mountains and their plains and their islands waiting around for tourists. It was easy for them to believe that man fit in rather well. This fittingness may have given them the idea that we are seemlier than other evidence suggests. The heads of Rameses II at Abu Simbel and, for that matter, the skyscrapers of New York, have another idea of man. So do the artifacts of Albert Speer. It is depressing to wonder whether the Greeks just happened to be lucky, and the dream they left us is a lie about ourselves.”

John Leonard (1939–2008) American critic, writer, and commentator

"The Caryatid" (p. 208)
Private Lives in the Imperial City (1979)

Dreams, Mountain, Idea, Light

“To love oneself is to struggle to rediscover and maintain your uniqueness. It is understanding and appreciating the idea that you will be the only you to ever live upon this earth, that when you die so will all of your fantastic possibilities. It is the realization that even you are not totally aware of the wonders which lie dormant within yourself.”

Leo Buscaglia (1924–1998) Motivational speaker, writer

LOVE (1972)

Love, Idea, Understanding

“As to the allegation of the Communist that religion makes men passive, we have only to observe that the dynamic power of religious convictions is precisely what prevents a soundly religious person from accepting Communist oppression and Communist mandates. A person practicing the teachings of the Judaic-Christian philosophy will not lie or steal on command. He will not shed innocent blood. He will not participate in the diabolical Communist practice of genocide - the systematic extermination of entire nations or classes. It is clearly evident from the numerous Communist writings that what they fear in religion is not that it makes religious people passive to the dominant class but that it prevents them from becoming passive to Communist discipline. Deep spiritual convictions stand like a wall of resistance to challenge the teachings and practices of Communism. Furthermore, the Communist sees in the dynamic ideology of Judaic-Christian teachings a force for peace which cuts through the vitals of Communism's campaign for world-wide revolution.”

W. Cleon Skousen book The Naked Communist

The Naked Communist (1958)

Men, People, World, Fear

“In such times, if you want neither to lie nor to wound, you are reduced to being silent.”

Joseph Joubert (1754–1824) French moralist and essayist

Time

“Indeed, the interests of the oppressors lie in 'changing the consciousness of the oppressed, not the situation which oppresses them';”

Paulo Freire (1921–1997) educator and philosopher

Source: Pedagogia do oprimido (Pedagogy of the Oppressed) (1968, English trans. 1970), Chapter 1, The Banking Concept of Education

Change

“The system is wrong. I am ashamed to be an American. And the title of 'U. S. soldier' is just the lie of fools.”

Bowe Bergdahl (1986) American soldier captured by the Taliban in 2009 and released in 2014 as part of a prisoner swap

Last e-mail to parents (2009)

Fools

“Through the wide open window on great star,
Swinging her lamp above the pear-tree high,
Looks in upon these dreaming forms that lie
So near in body, yet in soul so far
As those bright worlds thick strewn ion that vast depth of sky.”

Eva Dobell (1876–1963) British poet

Unsourced, Night Duty

World, Dreams, Soul, Star

“A child - so wasted and so white,
He told a lie to get his way,
To march, a man with men, and fight
While other boys are still at play.
A gallant lie your heart will say.”

Eva Dobell (1876–1963) British poet

Unsourced, In A Soldiers' Hospital 1: Pluck

Men, Way, Boy, Heart

“The lure of Egypt, gentlemen, and the greater exotic lure of the lands beyond. The East – does not our way lie there? Europe shall, after tomorrow, be wholly ours. We do not wish America or Africa, shapeless savage continents with no future. But ah, the East. India, China, fabulous Japan. And, of course,’ with a fierce savagery replacing the mystic look, ‘we have the mission of striking at the enemy of mankind in that very East where he has so precarious a toehold”

Anthony Burgess (1917–1993) English writer

Fiction, Napoleon Symphony (1974)

Way, Future

“His [Diego Rivera's] supposed mythomania is in direct relation to his tremendous imagination. That is to say, he is as much of a liar as the poets or as the children who have not yet been turned into idiots by school or mothers. I have heard him tell all kinds of lies: from the most innocent, to the most complicated stories about people whom his imagination combined in a fantastic situation or actions, always with a great sense of humor and a marvelous critical sense; but I have never heard him say a single stupid or banal lie. Lying, or playing at lying, he unmasks many people, he learns the interior mechanism of others, who are much more ingenuously liars than he, and the most curious thing about the supposed lies of Diego, is that in the long and short of it, those who are involved in the imaginary combination become angry, not because of the lie, but because of the truth contained in the lie, that always comes to the surface.”

Frida Kahlo (1907–1954) Mexican painter

Frida's quote On Diego Rivera, in 'Portrait of Diego' [Retrato de Diego] (22 January 1949), first published in Hoy (Mexico City) and posthumously (17 July 1955) in Novedades (Mexico City): "México en la Cultura"
1946 - 1953

Children, People, Truth, Stupidity

“Misery is a vacuum. A space without air, a suffocated dead place, the abode of the miserable. Misery is a tenement block, rooms like battery cages, sit over your own droppings, lie on your own filth. Misery is a no U-turns, no stopping road. Travel down it pushed by those behind, tripped by those in front. Travel down it at furious speed though the days are mummified in lead. It happens so fast once you get started, there's no anchor from the real world to slow you down, nothing to hold on to. Misery pulls away the brackets of life leaving you to free fall. Whatever your private hell, you'll find millions like it in Misery. This is the town where everyone's nightmares come true.”

Jeanette Winterson (1959) English writer

Written on the Body (1992)

Life, World, Travel, Hell

“If you drive a nation to adopt procedures which run counter to its instincts, you weaken and may destroy the motive force of its action…You will realise that I am speaking of the frequent suggestion that the United Kingdom should join a federation on the continent of Europe. This is something which we know, in our bones, we cannot do…For Britain's story and her interests lie far beyond the continent of Europe. Our thoughts move across the seas to the many communities in which our people play their part, in every corner of the world. These are our family ties. That is our life: without it we should be no more than some millions of people living in an island off the coast of Europe, in which nobody wants to take any particular interest.”

Anthony Eden (1897–1977) British Conservative politician, prime minister

Speech to the Columbia University, New York (January 1952), quoted in Anthony Eden, Full Circle (Cassell, 1960), pp. 36-7

Life, People, World, Family

“For centuries men looked for comfort to their deepest anguish, but all answers seemed small before death. Until someone, it’s unknown who, discovered the truth. And since they saw it served all as an answer to the fears of the first man, they defended it with their blood and with the blood of others, first and then with the lie.”

Jorge Majfud (1969) Uruguayan-American writer

La ciudad de la Luna (2009)

Death, Men, Truth, Fear

“I was angry with you about him, furious that he so much as set eyes on you. I would rather kill you than see you lie in his arms.” “is that love then? A thing that leads to murder?” “I don’t know. In all honesty, I don’t know. You’re mine. What’s mine I keep, I rule, and give my body over to defend. I offer you my honor, and my life. That’s not an easy thing. Its within your power to break my pride, and take that life, insignificant though it is.” “you put it very simply.” “its not. Such a gift rouses strange passions, fears of treachery, and deep distrust. I’m not immune to them.” “no one told me it would be like this. Perhaps it won't go into words, what I feel for you. Its not desire, yet I love your touch, the warm softness of your flesh against mine.””

Alice Borchardt (1939–2007) American fiction writer

Devoted

Love, Life, Fear, Feeling

“I never lie, even to this day. Not even a little. Unless you count playing pranks on people, which I don't. That's comedy. Entertainment doesn't count. A joke is different from a lie, even if the difference is kind of subtle.”

Steve Wozniak book iWoz

Source: iWoz (2006), p. 12

People

“The soft seduction of consumer global capitalism reduce the nations of the West to a rootless mass of Americanised consumers, without identity, without pride and without a future. Children identify with the grotesque and vulgar instead of noble heroes and beautiful princesses in castles. Teenagers ape the antics of degenerate pop-stars whose example leads hundreds of thousands into the living death of drug addiction, not to mention the tragedy of the image conscious girls (mainly) who feel compelled to starve themselves to get "the look" and of course the spiralling number of abortions. Adults perform meaningless jobs, in conditions of mind-destroying boredom, to earn enough money to buy the latest needlessly created want to be pushed on television as the thing without which their neighbours will regard them as worthless failures. Old folk die unnoticed and lie rotting for weeks, even months, in barred and bolted flats in inhuman tower blocks, unofficial prisons which become tombs for those who no longer have any economic value. Do not be fooled by the glossy packaging of the consumer society. Where state socialism was a creed of terror and stagnation, capitalism is one of apathy and death.”

Nick Griffin (1959) British politician

Nick Griffin, The Deadly Twins.

Death, Money, Children, Beauty

“Moreover, the lie that the film propagates claiming that I would equate Israel with Nazi Germany is abhorrent. I have never made such a reprehensible equation.”

Joseph Massad (1963) Associate Professor of Arab Studies

Massad, in "Intimidating Columbia University" in the Egyptian newspaper Al-Ahram, on the short film Columbia Unbecoming concerning claims of mistreatment of students with opposing viewpoints. (2004)
On Comparisons of Israel to Nazi Germany

“The politicians who make a lastin’ success in politics are the men who are always loyal to their friends, even up to the gate of State prison, if necessary; men who keep their promises and never lie. p. 35”

George Washington Plunkitt (1842–1924) New York State Senator

Plunkitt of Tammany Hall, Chapter 8, Ingratitude in Politics

Men, Success

“In Rangoon
The heat of noon
Is just what the natives shun,
They put their Scotch
Or Rye down
And lie down.”

Noel Coward (1899–1973) English playwright, composer, director, actor and singer

Mad Dogs and Englishmen (1930)

“I am completely convinced that the ultimate weapon is one that you can hold in your hand, point at a person, and thereby completely disrupt his sense of balance. All that he could do is lie in a huddled heap and puke. It would probably disrupt the concept of heroics for all time.”

Alexei Panshin book Rite of Passage

Source: Rite of Passage (1968), Chapter 10 (p. 139).

Sense, Time, Personality

“I never lie unless it is absolutely necessary. Or convenient.”

Walter Slezak (1902–1983) actor

Source: What Time's the Next Swan? (1962), Ch. 1, p. 8

“Sometimes I am a collector of data, and only a collector, and am likely to be gross and miserly, piling up notes, pleased with merely numerically adding to my stores. Other times I have joys, when unexpectedly coming upon an outrageous story that may not be altogether a lie, or upon a macabre little thing that may make some reviewer of my more or less good works mad. But always there is present a feeling of unexplained relations of events that I note, and it is this far-away, haunting, or often taunting, awareness, or suspicion, that keeps me piling on.”

Charles Fort (1874–1932) American writer

Ch. 4 http://www.resologist.net/talent04.htm <br class="br">Wild Talents (1932)

Feeling, Time, Joy, Madness

“I didn’t lie. I implied.”

Lisa Mason book Summer of Love

Source: Summer of Love (1994), Chapter 6 “Purple Haze” (p. 139)

“These Disciplines [mathematics] serve to inure and corroborate the Mind to a constant Diligence in Study; to undergo the Trouble of an attentive Meditation, and cheerfully contend with such Difficulties as lie in the Way. They wholly deliver us from a credulous Simplicity, most strongly fortify us against the Vanity of Scepticism, effectually restrain from a rash Presumption, most easily incline us to a due Assent, perfectly subject us to the Government of right Reason, and inspire us with Resolution to wrestle against the unjust Tyranny of false Prejudices. If the Fancy be unstable and fluctuating, it is to be poised by this Ballast, and steadied by this Anchor, if the Wit be blunt it is sharpened upon this Whetstone; if luxuriant it is pared by this Knife; if headstrong it is restrained by this Bridle; and if dull it is roused by this Spur. The Steps are guided by no Lamp more clearly through the dark Mazes of Nature, by no Thread more surely through the intricate Labyrinths of Philosophy, nor lastly is the Bottom of Truth sounded more happily by any other Line. I will not mention how plentiful a Stock of Knowledge the Mind is furnished from these, with what wholesome Food it is nourished, and what sincere Pleasure it enjoys. But if I speak farther, I shall neither be the only Person, nor the first, who affirms it; that while the Mind is abstracted and elevated from sensible Matter, distinctly views pure Forms, conceives the Beauty of Ideas, and investigates the Harmony of Proportions; the Manners themselves are sensibly corrected and improved, the Affections composed and rectified, the Fancy calmed and settled, and the Understanding raised and excited to more divine Contemplation. All which I might defend by Authority, and confirm by the Suffrages of the greatest Philosophers.”

Isaac Barrow (1630–1677) English Christian theologian, and mathematician

Source: Mathematical Lectures (1734), p. 31: Prefatory Oration

Pleasure, Truth, Food, Beauty

“Civilized men laugh," said Conan. "But not one can tell me how Zogar Sag can call pythons and tigers and leopards out of the wilderness and make them do his bidding. They would say it is a lie, if they dared. That's the way with civilized men. When they can't explain something by their half-baked science, they refuse to believe it.”

Robert E. Howard (1906–1936) American author

"Beyond the Black River" (1935)

Men, Way, Science

“A true prayer and religious reconciling of ourselves to Almighty God cannot enter into an impure soul, subject at the very time to the dominion of Satan. He who calls God to his assistance whilst in a course of vice, does as if a cut-purse should call a magistrate to help him, or like those who introduce the name of God to the attestation of a lie.”

Michel De Montaigne book Essays

Book I, Ch. 56. Of Prayers
Essais (1595), Book I

God, Soul, Time, Help

“When Earth's last picture is painted and the tubes are twisted and dried,
When the oldest colours have faded, and the youngest critic has died,
We shall rest, and, faith, we shall need it—lie down for an aeon or two,
Till the Master of All Good Workmen shall put us to work anew!”

Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936) English short-story writer, poet, and novelist

L'Envoi, Stanza 1 (1896).
The Seven Seas (1896)

Faith, Painting

“Martha Raddatz: …you, Secretary Clinton, purportedly say you need both a public and private position on certain issues….
Clinton: As I recall, that was something I said about Abraham Lincoln after having seen the wonderful Steven Spielberg movie …
Trump: Now she's blaming the lie on the late, great Abraham Lincoln. That's one that I haven't… OK, Honest Abe, Honest Abe never lied. That's the good thing. That's the big difference between Abraham Lincoln and you. That's a big, big difference. We're talking about some difference.”

Donald J. Trump (1946) 45th President of the United States of America

2010s, 2016, October, Second presidential debate (October 9, 2016)

“Choices after waking up: To be true or to lie? To take action or be brainwashed? To be free or be jailed?”

Ai Weiwei (1957) Chinese concept artist

Ai Weiwei Twitter feed: @AiWW (8:50 a.m. September 5, 2009)
2000-09, Twitter feeds, 2009

“New England's dead. New England's dead!
On every hill they lie;
On every field of strife, made red
By bloody victory.”

Isaac McLellan (1806–1899) American writer

New England's Dead, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).

Victory, Dead

“The balls, the chutzpah, the gall, nerve and impudence of the successful lie that is huge enough never to be questioned is always a source of immense professional pleasure amongst magicians with any sense of the theatrical.”

Derren Brown (1971) British illusionist

Books, Harry Houdini on Deception (foreword) (2009)

Pleasure, Question, Sense, Success

“It remained difficult for me to understand how some people are simply born mentally deformed, lacking all the natural moral restraints and imagination which dictate the actions of most of us, however partially. Such creatures have learned from childhood to ape the appropriate sentiments when it suits them, to charm or bully their opponents, to agree to anything, to tell any lie and to pursue their own ends with implacable determination.
“Such men and women are the true aliens amongst you and it is ironic how frequently we come to rule you. We use your very best instincts and deepest emotions against you. We convince you that we alone can satisfy your need for security and comfort and then we drain you dry of everything save perpetual terror. Ha, ha, ha!””

Michael Moorcock book The Steel Tsar

Book 2, Chapter 7 “A Mechanical Man” (p. 389)
The Steel Tsar (1981)

Women, Men, People, Imagination

“The lover of romance may lie in the sun, caring not for the time of day and content to watch the butterflies that cross his blue sky on the way from one flower to another. But the historian is an entomologist who must be stirring. He must catch the moths, which are his facts, in the net which is his memory, and he must fasten them upon his paper with sharp pins, which are dates.”

Francis Marion Crawford (1854–1909) Novelist, short story writer, essayist (1854-1909)

Don Orsino (1891)

Way, Flowers, Lovers, Memory

“He certainly over-heated himself at Venice by walking at a season when it is said that only Dogs and Englishmen are seen out of doors at noon, all else lie down in the middle of the day.”

Charles Burney (1726–1814) English music historian

Music, Men and Manners in France and Italy, 1770 (1969) p. 94.

Dogs, Season

“Humanity is a huge aggregate lie, and a huge lie is less than a small truth. Humanity is less, far less than the individual, because the individual may sometimes be capable of truth, and humanity is a tree of lies. And they say that love is the greatest thing; they persist in SAYING this, the foul liars, and just look at what they do! Look at all the millions of people who repeat every minute that love is the greatest, and charity is the greatest— and see what they are doing all the time. By their works ye shall know them, for dirty liars and cowards, who daren't stand by their own actions, much less by their own words.”

D.H. Lawrence book Women in Love

Source: Women in Love (1920), Ch. 11

Love, People, Truth, Tree

“If this myth of the harpies were a reality, what of the other legends—the Hydra, the centaurs, the chimera, Medusa, Pan and the satyrs? All those myths of antiquity—behind them did there lie and lurk nightmare realities with slavering fangs and talons steeped in shuddersome evil? Africa, the Dark Continent, land of shadows and horror, of bewitchment and sorcery, into which all evil things had been banished before the growing light of the western world!”

Robert E. Howard (1906–1936) American author

"Wings in the Night" (1932)

World, Reality, Light, Evil

“I lie back. They've "refurbished" the room. I loathe the word, its blunt sound (as if someone with a cold were trying to say "furnished"), and don't say it without irony.”

Amit Chaudhuri (1962) contemporary Indian-English novelist

Friend of My Youth (2017)

“I don't know how to lie. But I don't know what truth is, either. I always try to speak the way I think will cause least trouble to God and men.”

Halldór Laxness (1902–1998) Icelandic author

Ólafur talking to Vegmey
Heimsljós (World Light) (1940), Book Two: The Palace of the Summerland

Men, God, Truth, Way

“Let the church come to God in the strength of a perfect weakness, in the power of a felt helplessness and a child-like confidence, and then, either she has no strength, and has no right to be, or she has a strength that is infinite. Then and thus, will she stretch out the rod over the seas of difficulty that lie before her, and the waters shall divide, and she shall pass through, and sing the song of deliverance.”

Mark Hopkins (educator) (1802–1887) American educationalist and theologian

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 146.

God, Confidence, Water, Singing

“The secret virtues which lie hid in salt confirm the same. For salt whiteneth all thinges, it hardeneth all thinges, it preserveth all thinges, it giveth favour to all thinges, it is that masticke which gleweth all thinges together, it gathereth and knitteth all minerall matters, and of manie thousand peeces it maketh one masse. This salt giveth sounde to all thinges, and without the sounde no metall will wring in his shirle voyce. Salt maketh men merrie, it whiteneth the flesh, and it giveth beautie to all reasonable creatures, it entertayneth that love and amitie which is betwixt the male and female, through the great vigour and stirring uppe which it provoketh in the engendering members; it helpeth to procreation, it giveth unto creatures their voyce, as also unto metalles. * * * * * And it is salt that maketh all seedes to flourish and growe, and although the number of men is verie small, which can give any true reason whie dungue shoulde doe anie good in arable groundes, but are ledde thereto more by custome than anie philosophicall reason, nevertheless it is apparaunt that no dungue, which is layde uppon barraine groundes, could anie way enrich the same, if it were not for the salt which the straw and hay left behinde them by their putrifaction.”

Hugh Plat (1552–1608) writer

As cited in: Robert Kemp Philp (1859, p. 73)
The Jewell House of Art and Nature, 1594

Love, Men, Secret, Beauty

“The most successful behaviour-liars are those who, instead of consciously concentrating on modifying specific signals, think themselves into the basic mood they wish to convey and then let the small details take care of themselves. This method is frequently used with great success by professional liars, such as actors and actresses. Their entire working lives are spent performing behavioural lies, a process which can sometimes be extremely damaging to their private lives. Politicians and diplomats are also required to perform an undue amount of behavioural lying, but unlike the actors they are not socially 'licensed to lie', and the resultant guilt feelings tend to interfere with their performances. Also, unlike the actors, they do not undergo prolonged training courses.”

Desmond Morris book The Naked Ape

(2000), p. 116
The Naked Ape (1967)

Feeling, Lying, Mood, Thinking

“I tell the Iranians that if they hear from people here or there that pictures of Ayatollah Khamenei are hung in Iraqi homes, it is a lie.”

Iyad Jamal Al-Din (1961) Iraqi politician

Sayyed Ayad Jamal Aldin: Iraqis Do Not Put Pictures of Khamenei in Their Homes, Al-Arabiya TV, January 3, 2005 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VyjdKV9wxpk,

People, Home

“Real greatness has nothing to do with a man’s sphere. It does not lie in the magnitude of his outward agency, in the extent of the effects which he produces. The greatest men may do comparatively little.”

William Ellery Channing (1780–1842) United States Unitarian clergyman

Source: Self-Culture (1838)

Men

“The solution, as all thoughtful people recognize, must lie in properly melding the themes of inborn predisposition and shaping through life's experiences. This fruitful joining cannot take the false form of percentages adding to 100—as in “intelligence is 80 percent nature and 20 percent nurture,” or “homosexuality is 50 percent inborn and 50 percent learned,” and a hundred other harmful statements in this foolish format. When two ends of such a spectrum are commingled, the result is not a separable amalgam (like shuffling two decks of cards with different backs), but an entirely new and higher entity that cannot be decomposed”

Stephen Jay Gould book Dinosaur in a Haystack

just as adults cannot be separated into maternal and paternal contributions to their totality
"The Monster's Human Nature", p. 60
Dinosaur in a Haystack (1995)

Life, People, Intelligence, Nature

“If you take the life lie from an average man, you take away his happiness as well.”

Henrik Ibsen The Wild Duck

Relling, Act V
The Wild Duck (1884)

Life, Happiness

“For this reason Ahuramazda bore aid, and the other gods who are, because I was not hostile, I was not a Lie-follower, I was not a doer of wrong -- neither I nor my family. According to righteousness I conducted myself. Neither to the weak nor to the powerful did I do wrong.”

Darius I of Persia (-550–-486 BC) 3rd king of the Persian Achaemenid Empire (550–486 BC)

DB inscription http://www.avesta.org/op/op.htm#db1, COLUMN 4, 63. (4.61-7.)

God, Hostility, Family

“Our mission is to advance a Culture of Life where everyone is welcomed in life and defended in law. Our objectives to that end are to reverse Roe and defeat Planned Parenthood. I believe both of these goals are achievable in our lifetime if we remain committed, focused, optimistic and strategic. Although of course, in the end, the battle is not ours -- our duty is to remain faithful to the calling before us. As you rightly say, we have to oppose the lie… and the best weapon in that effort is the light of truth.”

Charmaine Yoest (1964) American anti-abortion activist

Interview with AUL Action's Charmaine Yoest on 'Open Letter to Barack Obama' http://www.catholic.org/news/national/story.php?id=30332 (October 31, 2008)

Life, Truth, Faith, Law

Quotes about lies page 14

Quotes about lies
page 14