Quotes about lies (1932 quotes, page 15)

“Rest is not idleness, and to lie sometimes on the grass under the trees on a summer's day, listening to the murmur of water, or watching the clouds float across the blue sky, is by no means waste of time.”

John Lubbock, 1st Baron Avebury (1834–1913) British banker, Liberal politician, philanthropist, scientist and polymath

The Use of Life (1894), ch. IV: Recreation

Tree , Grass , Water , Time

“Even if a minefield or the abyss should lie before me, I will march straight ahead without looking back. AZ Quotes”

Zhu Rongji (1928) former Premier of the People's Republic of China

Quotes

“Mortality, behold and fear!
What a change of flesh is here!
Think how many royal bones
Sleep within this heap of stones:
Here they lie, had realms and lands,
Who now want strength to stir their hands”

Francis Beaumont (1584–1616) British dramatist

On the Tombs in Westminster Abbey http://www.englishverse.com/poems/on_the_tombs_in_westminster_abbey

Fear , Thinking , Sleep , Change

“Nature knows nothing but solid bodies; your science deals only with combinations of surfaces. And so nature constantly gives the lie to all your laws; can you name one to which no fact makes an exception?”

Honoré de Balzac book Séraphîta

Source: Seraphita (1835), Ch. 4: The Clouds of the Sanctuary.

Law , Nature , Science

“Only in the case of immigration is the public systematically lied to from every major news outlet. The media lie about everything, but immigration constitutes their finest hour of collective lying.”

Ann Coulter (1961) author, political commentator

2015, Adios, America: The Left's Plan to Turn Our Country into a Third World Hellhole (2015)

Lying

“You have to have some psychological insight, you have to know the people and you must work in a way that’s acceptable to them. There you must smile — never laugh, because that’s considered making fun. Smile, take your time, and never come bursting in with your own personality. You have to lie low. Of course you can push and perhaps raise your voice a notch, but like a sensitive emulsion, a sensitive plate. Approach gently, tenderly, and never intrude, never push. Otherwise, if you use your elbows, it will work against you. Above all, be human!”

Henri Cartier-Bresson (1908–2004) French photographer

Source: Henri Cartier-Bresson: Interviews and Conversations, 1951-1998, Conversation. Interview with Byron Dobell (1957), p. 36

People , Smile , Way , Time

“There are many other ways in which language can be used to manipulate an audience. one obvious way is to simply lie.”

Randal Marlin (1938) Canadian academic

Source: Propaganda & The Ethics Of Persuasion (2002), Chapter Three, Propaganda Technique, p. 107

Way

“Sweet spring, full of sweet days and roses,
A box where sweets compacted lie.”

George Herbert (1593–1633) Welsh-born English poet, orator and Anglican priest

Virtue, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

Spring , Box

“Politics is a dirty business, a ruse, an ideological cul-de-sac, a vast looter of intellectual and financial resources, a lie that corrupts, a deceiver, a means of unleashing vast evil in the world of the most unexpected and undetected sort and the greatest diverter of human productivity ever concocted by those who do not believe in authentic social and economic progress.”

Jeffrey Tucker (1963) American writer

World , Business , Evil

“Money expresses all qualitative differences of things in terms of "how much?" Money, with all its colorlessness and indifference, becomes the common denominator of all values; irreparably it hollows out the core of things, their individuality, their specific value, and their incomparability. All things float with equal specific gravity in the constantly moving stream of money. All things lie on the same level and differ from one another only in the size of the area which they cover.”

Georg Simmel (1858–1918) German sociologist, philosopher, and critic

The Metropolis and Modern Life (1903)

Money , Indifference

“The time has come for the dismantling of fantasies. That is already happening to our universe. Now that we have this one chance of survival we must finally rid ourselves of fantasies and seize that chance!
For centuries our race has built on false assumptions. If you build a fantasy based on a false assumption and continue to build on such a fantasy, your whole existence becomes a lie which you implant in others who are too lazy or too busy to question its truth.
In this manner you threaten the very existence of reality, because, by refusing to obey its laws, those laws engulf and destroy you. The human race has for too long been manufacturing convenient fantasies and calling them laws. For ages this was so. Take war, for instance. Politicians assume that something is true, assume that strife is inevitable, and by building on such false assumptions, lo and behold, they create further wars which they have, ostensibly, sought to prevent.
We have, until now, accepted too many fantasies as being truths, too many truths as fantasies. And we have one last chance to discover the real nature of our existence. I am prepared to take it!”

Michael Moorcock (1939) English writer, editor, critic

Source: The Sundered Worlds (1965), Chapter 7 (pp. 229-230)

War , Truth , Age , Law

“The worst of all of this is the lie that condoms really protect against AIDS. The condom failure rate can be as high as 20 percent. Would you get on a plane — or put your children on a plane — if one of five passengers would be killed on the flight? Well, the statistic holds for condoms, folks.”

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

[The Way Things Ought to Be, Pocket Books, October 1992, 134, 978-0671751456, 92028659, 26397008, 1724938M]

Children , Failure

“My lips told a lie
For a trivial reason
It wasn't for anyone else
But only to protect myself
And I didn't think about anyone else”

Ayumi Hamasaki (1978) Japanese recording artist, lyricist, model, and actress

Walking Proud
Lyrics, My Story

Thinking

“When you get in these people when you… get these people in, say: 'Look, the problem is that this will open the whole, the whole Bay of Pigs thing, and the President just feels that' ah, without going into the details… don't, don't lie to them to the extent to say there is no involvement, but just say this is sort of a comedy of errors, bizarre, without getting into it, 'the President believes that it is going to open the whole Bay of Pigs thing up again.' And, ah because these people are plugging for, for keeps and that they should call the FBI in and say that we wish for the country, don't go any further into this case, period!”

Richard Nixon (1913–1994) 37th President of the United States of America

The 'smoking gun tape' on (23 June 1972)
1970s

People , Error , Feeling , Problem

“Three years after the CCTV headquarters fire [in Beijing in February 2009], human skeletons lie forgotten. Is anyone accountable?”

Ai Weiwei (1957) Chinese concept artist

Ai Weiwei on Twitter in English (beta). (February 26, 2012) http://aiwwenglish.tumblr.com/
2010-, Twitter feeds, 2010-12

“Let us therefore continue our triumphal march to the realization of the American dream…. for all of us today, the battle is in our hands… The road ahead is not altogether a smooth one. There are no broad highways that lead us easily and inevitably to quick solutions… We are still in for the season of suffering… How long? Not long. Because no lie can live forever… our God is marching on.”

Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–1968) American clergyman, activist, and leader in the American Civil Rights Movement

Speech on the steps of the State Capitol Building, Montgomery, Alabama (25 March 1965), as transcribed from a tape recording; reported in Respectfully Quoted: A Dictionary of Quotations (1989), which states that this speech was not reported in its entirety.
1960s

God , Dreams , Suffering , Season

“Yet now despair itself is mild,
Even as the winds and waters are;
I could lie down like a tired child,
And weep away the life of care
Which I have borne and yet must bear,
Till death like sleep might steal on me,
And I might feel in the warm air
My cheek grow cold, and hear the sea
Breathe o'er my dying brain its last monotony.”

Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822) English Romantic poet

Stanzas Written in Dejection Near Naples http://www.readprint.com/work-1373/Percy-Bysshe-Shelley (1818), st. 5

Life , Death , Feeling , Sleep

“An ambassador is an honest man sent to lie abroad for the commonwealth.”

Henry Wotton (1568–1639) English ambassador

Reliquiae Wottonainae (1651). In a letter to Velserus, 1612, Wotton says, "This merry definition of an ambassador I had chanced to set down at my friend's, Mr. Christopher Fleckamore, in his Album".

“Historians may lie, but History cannot.”

George Saintsbury (1845–1933) British literary critic

Source: A Last Vintage, p. 172.

History

“When . . . some leisurely passer-by stopped . . . and spoke of cheating, that was in its way the stupidest lie ever invented by indifference and inborn malice, since it was not the hunger artist who was cheating, he was working honestly, but the world was cheating him of his reward.”

Franz Kafka (1883–1924) author

"A Hunger Artist"
The Complete Stories (1971)

Hunger , World , Way , Cheating

“Spare me four things– and say after that what thou pleasest– do not lie to me for liars have no judgment, and do not answer me regarding what I don not ask thee for it is a distraction from what I do ask thee, and do not be extravagant in my praise for I know myself better then thou, and do not incite me against my subjects for verily clemency unto them is more needful for me.”

Abd al-Malik ibn Marwan (646–705) 5th Umayyad caliph

History of The Caliphs, p. 224

“I'm just a dark guy from a den of iniquity. A dark shadowy figure from the bowels of iniquity. I wish I could be Mike who gets an endorsement deal. But you can't make a lie and a truth go together. This country wasn't built on moral fiber. This country was built on rape, slavery, murder, degradation and affiliation with crime.”

Mike Tyson (1966) American boxer

As quoted in Telegraph http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/main.jhtml?xml=/sport/2002/05/01/sotys02.xml (2002).

Truth , Guy , Country

“Here dead we lie because we did not choose
To live and shame the land from which we sprung.
Life, to be sure, is nothing much to lose;
But young men think it is, and we were young.”

A.E. Housman (1859–1936) English classical scholar and poet

No. 36.
More Poems http://www.kalliope.org/vaerktoc.pl?vid=housman/1936 (1936)

Life , Men , Thinking , Dead

“[W]e have more than two options… a critique of reason does not have to be a call for the return of superstition and arbitrary power…. [O]ur problems do not lie with reason itself but with our obsessive treatment of reason as an absolute value. Certainly it is one of our qualities, but it functions positively only when balanced and limited by the others.”

John Ralston Saul The Doubter's Companion

"Instrumental Reason"
The Doubter's Companion (1994)

Problem

“Billions of dollars in research knowledge lie dormant at universities waiting for the right disruptor to come along and create a business.”

Jay Samit (1961) American businessman

Source: Disrupt You! (2015), p.140

Business , Knowledge , Universe , Waiting

“It seemed, at least, that they had not taught the boy to lie. But they had not taught him to know truth from lies.”

Ursula K. Le Guin Hainish Cycle

Source: Hainish Cycle, City of Illusions (1967), Chapter 8

Truth , Boy

“Let me tell you, world,
I—do—not—believe!
If a thousand challengers lie beneath your feet,
Count me as number one thousand and one.I don't believe the sky is blue:
I don't believe in thunder's echoes;
I don't believe that dreams are false:
I don't believe that death has no revenge.”

Bei Dao (1949) contemporary Chinese (PRC) avant garde poet

"The Answer" https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/50088/the-answer-56d22cd8d69d0, p. 33
The August Sleepwalker (1990)

Falseness , World , Dreams , Revenge

“Bobbio’s theoretical defence of the distinction between Left and Right, for all its eloquence, may thus be more vulnerable than it appears. If we ask why this should be so, the answer surely lies in the difficulty of constructing an axiology of political values without coherent reference to the empirical social world. Bobbio often writes as if he could separate his ideal taxonomy from contemporary history, but of course he cannot. In practice he admits the political scenery of the present into his account selectively, for the purposes of his argument. But it is in that present that the deeper reasons and limits of his intervention lie.”

Perry Anderson (1938) British historian

Spectrum: From Right to Left in the World of Ideas (2005), Ch. 6. "Plotting Values, Norberto Bobbio" (1998)

World , History , Appearance

“We know that more than 70 to 80% of women masturbate, and 90% of men masturbate, and the rest lie.”

Joycelyn Elders (1933) American pediatrician, public health administrator, and former Surgeon General of the United States

Penn & Teller: Bullshit!, "Abstinence" http://www.sho.com/site/video/player.do?video=/134/2006/abstinence&seriesid=134 [4.10], 5 June 2006
Masturbation

Women , Men

“But mothers lie. It's in the job description.”

John Green book An Abundance of Katherines

Colin Singleton, p. 4
An Abundance of Katherines (2006)

“Let us speak plainly: everything which keeps us from self-dissolution, every lie which protects us against our unbreathable certitudes is religious.”

Emil M. Cioran (1911–1995) Romanian philosopher and essayist

The Temptation to Exist (1956)

“2048. Report not an ill Thing that thou thy self knowest not, but by the Report of a Man, who may lie or aggravate the Matter.”

Thomas Fuller (writer) (1654–1734) British physician, preacher, and intellectual

Introductio ad prudentiam: Part II (1727)

“By the winding stream we shall lie and dream
We'll make dreams come true if we want them to
Yes all will come play the pipes and drum
Sing a happy song and we'll sing along.”

Van Morrison (1945) Northern Irish singer-songwriter and musician

Everyone
Song lyrics, Moondance (1970)

Dreams , Singing , Happiness

“I am no less confident, that no learned lawyer will affirm that an impeachment can lie against the King, they all going in his name: and one of their maxims is, that the King can do no wrong.”

Charles I of England (1600–1649) monarch of the three kingdoms of England, Scotland, and Ireland

Reasons for declining the jurisdiction of the High Court of Justice http://www.constitution.org/eng/conpur083.htm (21 January 1649)

Confidence , Learning

“On him does death lie heavily, who, but too well known to all, dies to himself unknown.”
Illi mors gravis incubat Qui notus nimis omnibus Ignotus moritur sibi

Seneca the Younger Thyestes

Illi mors gravis incubat
Qui notus nimis omnibus
Ignotus moritur sibi
Thyestes, lines 401-403; (Chorus).
Alternate translation: Death weighs on him who is known to all, but dies unknown to himself. (The Philisophical Life by James Miller).
Tragedies

Death

“Nevertheless, I still wonder. Each of us, with money, gets further and further away from those moments where the hand pulls the beet root from the soil, shakes the fish from the net into the basket—not to mention the way it separates us from one another, so that when enough money comes between people, they lie apart like parts of a chicken hacked up for stewing.”

Samuel R. Delany book Tales of Nevèrÿon

Source: Tales of Nevèrÿon (1979), Chapter 4, “The Tale of Potters and Dragons” Section 1 (p. 161)

Money , People , Way , Fish

“I lied. And my embarrassment was so great that I changed everything else to make the lie true.”

James Richardson (1950) American poet

#403
Vectors: Aphorisms and Ten Second Essays (2001)

Change

“It first was a rumour dismissed as a lie
but then came the evidence none could deny:
a double page spread in the Sunday Express —
The Russians are running the DHSS!”

Attila the Stockbroker (1957) punk poet, folk punk musician and songwriter

"Russians in the DHSS", from Cautionary Tales for Dead Commuters (1985)
DHSS = Department of Health and Social Security, a British government department.

“All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie,
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man-in-the-street
And the lie of Authority
Whose buildings grope the sky:
There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.”

W. H. Auden September 1, 1939

Source: September 1, 1939 (1939), Lines 78–88; for a 1955 anthology text the poet changed this line to "We must love one another and die" to avoid what he regarded as a falsehood in the original.

Love , Hunger

“Can desire grow out of admiration, or are the two quite distinct species? What would it be like to lie side by side, naked, breast to breast, with a woman one principally admires?”

J.M. Coetzee book Slow Man

Slow Man (2004)

“You just sit here and tolerate it, the same way everything in this country is tolerated. Every deception, every lie, every bullet in the brains. Just as you are already tolerating bullets in the brains that will be implemented only after the bullet is put in your brains.”

Imre Kertész (1929–2016) Hungarian writer

Liquidation (2003)

Way , Country

“Up to eight feet long and as heavy as a lioness, the adult Komodo dragon brandishes steak-knifelike teeth - sharp, recurved blades with serrated cutting edges. Showing the same sagacity found in veteran Nile crocodiles, fully adult dragons know their hunting territory from years of experience. They know where to lie along hilly game trails, awaiting the light footsteps of a deer. Attacks are instant successes or failures because the ora has no stamina, and if it misses on the first short rush, it has little sustained speed for a long pursuit. When an attack succeeds, the cruel rows of slashing teeth cut fearful wounds on the rump and thigh of ambushed animals and the stricken prey may die of massive infection days later even if it manages to break free from the dragon's mouth. Tethered livestock suffer truly terrible cuts across the legs when an ora slinks into the compound under cover of the warm Indonesian nights. Several humans, both native and European visitors, have died in savage daylight attacks. The victims simply had no warning sign that the ora was waiting patiently a few feet from the trail's edge.”

Robert T. Bakker book The Dinosaur Heresies

The Dinosaur Heresies: A Revolutionary View of Dinosaurs (1986), Longman Scientific & Technical, p. 62-63
The Dinosaur Heresies (1986)

Fear , Game , Failure , Light

“The reviewers of fifty years ago knew that their primary loyalty must lie not with their fellow poets or publishers but with the reader. Consequently they reported their reactions with scrupulous honesty even when their opinions might lose them literary allies and writing assignments. In discussing new poetry they addressed a wide community of educated readers. Without talking down to their audience, they cultivated a public idiom. Prizing clarity and accessibility they avoided specialist jargon and pedantic displays of scholarship. They also tried, as serious intellectuals should but specialists often do not, to relate what was happening in poetry to social, political, and artistic trends. They charged modern poetry with cultural importance and made it the focal point of their intellectual discourse.”

Dana Gioia (1950) American writer

Essays, Can Poetry Matter? (1991)

Education , Communication , Loyalty

“Any evolutionary science… is a close-knit body of theory. It is a theory of a process, of an unfolding sequence… of cumulative causation. The great deserts of the evolutionist leaders… lie… in their having shown how this colorless impersonal sequence of cause and effect can be made use of for theory proper, by virtue of its cumulative character.”

Thorstein Veblen (1857–1929) American academic

Source: "Why is economics not an evolutionary science?", 1898, pp. 375-378; As cited in: Geoffrey M. Hodgson, "Veblen and darwinism." International review of sociology 14.3 (2004): 343-361

Science

“The subtlest lie of all is the full truth.”

Michael Moorcock (1939) English writer, editor, critic

Source: Short fiction, To Rescue Tanelorn... (1962), p. 474

Truth

“On the battlefield called Vigrid, the gods will fall in battle with the frost giants, and the frost giants will fall in battle with the gods. The undead troops from Hel will litter the ground in their final deaths, and the noble Einherjar will lie beside them on the frozen ground, all of the them dead for the last time, beneath the lifeless misty sky, never to rise again, never to wake and fight.”

Neil Gaiman (1960) English fantasy writer

Source: Norse Mythology (2017), Chapter 16, “Ragnarok: The Final Destiny of the Gods” (p. 276)

Death , God , Time , Fight

“I have been young, but now am old. I have spent a whole life-time in battling against infidelity with the weapons of apologetic science; but I have become ever more and more convinced that the way to the heart does not lie through the head; and that the only way to the conversion of the head lies through a converted heart which already tastes the living fruits of the gospel.”

Friedrich Tholuck (1799–1877) German theologian

Reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 137.

Life , Way , Science , Time

“It was here that I first saw the light of day; here I received my bride, here my dead lie pillowed on the loving breast of our eternal hills.”

Calvin Coolidge (1872–1933) American politician, 30th president of the United States (in office from 1923 to 1929)

1920s, Vermont is a State I Love (1928)

Love , Light , Dead

““Outlier” is a scientific term to describe things or phenomena that lie outside normal experience. In the summer, in Paris, we expect most days to be somewhere between warm and very hot. But imagine if you had a day in the middle of August where the temperature fell below freezing. That day would be outlier. And while we have a very good understanding of why summer days in Paris are warm or hot, we know a good deal less about why a summer day in Paris might be freezing cold. In this book I’m interested in people who are outliers—in men and women who, for one reason or another, are so accomplished and so extraordinary and so outside of ordinary experience that they are as puzzling to the rest of us as a cold day in August.”

Malcolm Gladwell (1963) journalist and science writer

Malcolm Gladwell (2010) in: " Q and A with Malcolm http://gladwell.com/outliers/outliers-q-and-a-with-malcolm/," at gladwell.com, quoted in: Kate Vitasek (2011). The Vested Outsourcing Manual, p. 364

Women , Men , People , Books

“Marxist philosophy holds that the most important problem does not lie in understanding the laws of the objective world and thus being able to explain it, but in applying the knowledge of these laws actively to change the world.”

Mao Zedong (1893–1976) Chairman of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China

On Practice (1937)

World , Law , Understanding , Knowledge

“All things lie dark in possibility.”

William Saroyan (1908–1981) American writer

"Baby" (1936)

“I lay too many Eggs in the hot Sands of this Wilderness, the World! with Ostrich Carelessness & Ostrich Oblivion. The greater part, I trust, are trod underfoot, & smashed; but yet no small number crawl forth into Life, some to furnish Feathers for the Caps of others, & still more to plume the Shafts in the Quivers of my Enemies, of them that lie in wait against my Soul.”

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834) English poet, literary critic and philosopher

Notebooks, September/early October 1802
Notebooks

Life , World , Soul , Waiting

“This great principle does not deny to the needy nor to the poor the assistance they should have. The wholly incapacitated, the aged, the sickly are cared for with all tenderness, but every able-bodied person is enjoined to do his utmost for himself to avoid dependence, if his own efforts can make such a course possible; to look upon adversity as temporary; to combine his faith in his own ability with honest toil; to rehabilitate himself and his family to a position of independence; in every case to minimize the need for help and to supplement any help given with his own best efforts. We believe [that] seldom [do circumstances arise in which] men of rigorous faith, genuine courage, and unfaltering determination, with the love of independence burning in their hearts, and pride in their own accomplishments, cannot surmount the obstacles that lie in their paths. We know that through humble, prayerful, industrious, God-fearing lives, a faith can be developed within us by the strength of which we can call down the blessings of a kind and merciful Heavenly Father and literally see our handicaps vanish and our independence and freedom established and maintained.”

Henry D. Moyle (1889–1963) Member of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles

Conference Report, Apr. 1948, p. 5, and quoted in The Celestial Nature of Self-reliance http://lds.org/portal/site/LDSOrg/menuitem.b12f9d18fae655bb69095bd3e44916a0/?vgnextoid=2354fccf2b7db010VgnVCM1000004d82620aRCRD&locale=0&sourceId=0b3ac5e8b4b6b010VgnVCM1000004d82620a____&hideNav=1|
Quotes as an apostle

Love , Men , God , Age

“Dare to be true. Nothing can need a lie:
A fault, which needs it most, grows two thereby.”

George Herbert (1593–1633) Welsh-born English poet, orator and Anglican priest

The Temple (1633), The Church Porch

“The time has come to deal the enemy a terrific blow in Western Europe.
The blow will be struck by the combined sea, land and air forces of the Allies together constituting one great Allied team, under the supreme command of General Eisenhower.
On the eve of this great adventure I send my best wishes to every soldier in the Allied team.
To us is given the honour of striking a blow for freedom which will live in history; and in the better days that lie ahead men will speak with pride of our doings. We have a great and a righteous cause.
Let us pray that " The Lord Mighty in Battle " will go forth with our armies, and that His special providence will aid us in the struggle.
I want every soldier to know that I have complete confidence in the successful outcome of the operations that we are now about to begin.
With stout hearts, and with enthusiasm for the contest, let us go forward to victory.
And, as we enter the battle, let us recall the words of a famous soldier spoken many years ago :
"He either fears his fate too much,
Or his deserts are small,
Who dare not put it to the touch,
To win or lose it all. "

Good luck to each one of you. And good hunting on the main land of Europe.”

Bernard Montgomery, 1st Viscount Montgomery of Alamein (1887–1976) British Army officer, Commander of Allied forces at the Battle of El Alamein

Personal message to troops of 21st Army Group on the eve of D-Day

Men , Fate , Fear , Confidence

“One of the falsest of proverbs is that you must lie on the bed that you have made. The experience of life shows that people are constantly doing things which must lead to disaster, and yet by some chance manage to evade the result of their folly.”

W. Somerset Maugham book The Moon and Sixpence

Source: The Moon and Sixpence (1919), Ch. 33, p. 119

Life , People , Chance

“…At the time of his return he restored the fort of Dholpur also to Binayik Deo, and having spent the rainy season in Agra after the rising of the Canopus in the year AH 910 (AD 1504), marched to reduce the fortress of Mandrayal, which lie took without fighting from the Rajah of Mandrayal, who sued for peace; he also destroyed all the idol-temples and churches of the place…”

`Abd al-Qadir Bada'uni book Muntakhab-ut-Tawarikh

Sultan Sikandar Lodi (AD 1489-1517) Mandrail (Madhya Pradesh)
Muntakhab-ut-Tawarikh

Peace , Time , Fight , Season

“Self-portraiture is something one should never get involved in, since it is wrong to lie even though one endeavours to tell the truth.”

Ingmar Bergman (1918–2007) Swedish filmmaker

"Ingmar's self portrait" (1957) as quoted in "Who is he really?" http://www.ingmarbergman.se/universe.asp?guid=4F72F9D3-43BB-405D-B42B-3D091B8FAF3A

Truth

“Here where I lie is the hot pit
Crowding on the mind with coal
And the will turned against it
Only drills new seams of darkness
Through the dark-surrounding whole.
Our vivid suns of happiness
Withered from summer, drop their flowers;
Hands of the longed, withheld tomorrow
Fold on the hands of yesterday
In double sorrow.”

Stephen Spender (1909–1995) English poet and man of letters

"The Separation"
The Still Centre (1939)

Flowers , Sun , Summer , Happiness

“These things surely lie on the knees of the gods.”

Homér The Odyssey (Cowper)

I. 267. Cf. Iliad XVII. 514.
Odyssey (c. 725 BC)

God

“This is the key of modern science and is the beginning of the true understanding of nature. This idea. That to look at the things, to record the details, and to hope that in the information thus obtained, may lie a clue to one or another of a possible theoretical interpretation.”

Richard Feynman book The Character of Physical Law

Source: The Character of Physical Law (1965), chapter 1, “The Law of Gravitation,” p. 15: video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j3mhkYbznBk&t=12m45s

Hope , Idea , Understanding , Nature

“The nearer any soul draws to God, the more humble will that soul lie before God…the most holy men have always been the most humble men…If the work be good, though never so low, humility will put a hand to it; so will not pride.”

Thomas Brooks (1608–1680) English Puritan

The Unsearchable Riches of Christ

Men , God , Soul , Drawing

“Sweet heart, bitter heart
Now I can't tell you apart
Cozy and cold
Put the horse before the cartThose teenage hopes
Who have tears in their eyes
Too scared to own up
To one little lie.”

Leslie Feist (1976) Canadian musician

"1 2 3 4" (written with Sally Seltmann)
The Reminder (2007)

Hope , Tear , Heart , Horse

“His cold remains all naked to the sky,
On distant shores unwept, unburied lie.”

Homér The Odyssey (Cowper)

XI. 72–73 (tr. Alexander Pope); of Elpenor.
Odyssey (c. 725 BC)

Distant

“Leave the earth to the strong and athletic,
And the sea to adventure upon.
But the sun and the sand
No contractor can copy;
We lie in the land
Of the lotus and poppy;
We vegetate, calm and aesthetic,
On the beach, on the sand, in the sun.”

Ogden Nash (1902–1971) American poet

Many Long Years Ago (1945), Pretty Halcyon Days

Strong , Sun , Sea

“A fact never went into partnership with a miracle. Truth does not need the assistance of miracle. A fact will fit every other fact in the Universe, because it is the product of all other facts. A lie will fit nothing except another lie made for the express purpose of fitting it.”

Robert G. Ingersoll (1833–1899) Union United States Army officer

Truth , Universe , Partnership

“Corporate planning cycles are a classic example of generals fighting the last ware over again instead of preparing for what might lie ahead.”

Jay Samit (1961) American businessman

Source: Disrupt You! (2015), p.84

Fight

“At night I sit in my chamber and read the Bible. Far in the distance roars the sea. Then I lie down and think for a long time about the calm and pale man from Nazareth.”

Joseph Goebbels (1897–1945) Nazi politician and Propaganda Minister

Abends sitze ich auf meinem Zimmer und lese die Bibel. In der Ferne braust das Meer. Dann liege ich noch lange wach und denke an den stillen, bleichen Mann von Nazareth.
Michael: a German fate in diary notes (1926)

Thinking , Time , Reading , Sea

“One is constantly reminded of the infinite lavishness and fertility of Nature — inexhaustible abundance amid what seems enormous waste. And yet when we look into any of her operations that lie within reach of our minds, we learn that no particle of her material is wasted or worn out. It is eternally flowing from use to use, beauty to yet higher beauty; and we soon cease to lament waste and death, and rather rejoice and exult in the imperishable, unspendable wealth of the universe, and faithfully watch and wait the reappearance of everything that melts and fades and dies about us, feeling sure that its next appearance will be better and more beautiful than the last.”

John Muir book My First Summer in the Sierra

Terry Gifford, EWDB, page 279
1860s, My First Summer in the Sierra, 1869

Death , Beauty , Feeling , Nature

“To lie is to intentionally mislead others when they expect honest communication.”

Sam Harris (1967) American author, philosopher and neuroscientist

2010s, Lying (2011)

Communication

“They dont know the terrors that go through your mind as you lie there in the pit waiting for a hint of light to tell you that the night is over.”

Hubert Selby Jr. book The Room

The Room (1971)

Light , Waiting , Night

“In the theocracy of the soul majorities do not rule. God and the saints; against them the rabble of sinners, with clamorous voices and uplifted hand, striving to silence the oracle of the private heart. Beelzebub marshals majorities. Prophets and reformers are always special enemies of his and his minions. Multitudes ever lie. Every age is a Judas, and betrays its Messiahs into the hands of the multitude. The voice of the private, not popular heart, is alone authentic.”

Amos Bronson Alcott (1799–1888) American teacher and writer

XVII. THEOCRACY
Orphic Sayings

God , Age , Soul , Silence

“The individuality is the name, the form and superficial culture he acquires from tradition and environment. The uniqueness of man does not lie in the superficial but in complete freedom from the content of his consciousness, which is common to all humanity.”

Jiddu Krishnamurti (1895–1986) Indian spiritual philosopher

1980s

Freedom

“I must give some attention to the delicate question of religion, on which I have touched already. In my father's generation this question still was discussed with passion. Since then a sort of truce has existed in the countries of the West, while in the communist states of the East atheism has been made into the State religion. It is not advisable to blow on the embers of such controversies. But as I am talking about the limitations of our physical world picture I cannot but say that I do not believe in transgressions of the laws of nature. As these laws are of a statistical nature, and therefore allow deviations from the norm, I must define more clearly what I mean. The statistical deviations themselves obey certain laws. The miraculous events of religious tradition, however, are of a different kind, they lie on a different plane altogether; they are meant to prove something lying entirely beyond scientific consideration, such as the power of prayer, the intervention of divine power for or against certain men or nations.”

Max Born (1882–1970) physicist

Men , World , Religion , Law

“When I lie tangled in her hair,
And fettered to her eye,
The gods that wanton in the air
Know no such liberty.”

Richard Lovelace (1617–1658) English writer and poet

To Althea: From Prison, st. 1.
Lucasta (1649)

God

“The truth hurts
and lie's worse.”

James Morrison (1984) English singer-songwriter and guitarist

Broken Strings
Song lyrics, Undiscovered (James Morrison album) (2006)

Truth , Hurt

“The characteristic of life does not lie in a distinctiveness of single life processes. [Lebensvorgänge], but rather in a certain order among all the processes.”

Ludwig von Bertalanffy (1901–1972) austrian biologist and philosopher

Source: 1930s, L. von Bertalanffy (1934). "Wandlungen des biologischen Denkens", Neue Jahrbücher für Wissenschaft und Jugendbildung, 10:339-366; as cited in Manfred Drack (2008). " Ludwig von Bertalanffy's Early System Approach http://journals.isss.org/index.php/proceedings52nd/article/viewFile/1032/322"

Life

“If God does not lie at the end of any telescope, neither does he lie at the end of any syllogism. I can never starting from the natural order prove the divine order. The proof of the divine order must lie, somehow, within itself. It must be its own witness. For it, like the natural order, is complete within itself, self-contained.”

Walter Terence Stace (1886–1967) British civil servant, educator and philosopher.

p. 138.

God , Nature

“The three theological virtues of faith, hope and charity, aided by the highest and most sublime gifts of the Holy Spirit, such as understanding, wisdom, knowledge, and counsel, unite the creature, the human spirit, with his God, the souls with the Word of God. It is this sacred union that you must seek, hold and possess; in it lie the spiritual life, health and strength, and from it originate all the other virtues.”

Francisco Palau (1811–1872) Beatified Spanish Discalced Carmelite friar and priest

Letter to Juana Gratia (1857)

Life , Wisdom , God , Health

“But he couldn't lie if you paid him and he'd starve before he stole.”

Rudyard Kipling book Barrack-Room Ballads

The Mary Gloster.
Barrack-Room Ballads (1892, 1896)

“The History of Institutions cannot be mastered – can scarcely be approached – without an effort. It affords little of the romantic incident or of the picturesque grouping which constitute the charm of History in general, and holds out small temptation to the mind that requires to be tempted to the study of Truth. But it…abounds in examples of that continuity of life, the realisation of which is necessary to give the reader a personal hold on the past and a right judgment of the present. For the roots of the present lie deep in the past, and nothing in the past is dead to the man who would learn how the present comes to be what it is.”

William Stubbs (1825–1901) English historian and clergyman

The Constitutional History of England (1873-8; Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1903) vol. 1, p. iii.

Life , Truth , History , Effort

“Reason is Life's sole arbiter, the magic Laby'rinth's single clue:
Worlds lie above, beyond its ken; what crosses it can ne'er be true.”

Richard Francis Burton (1821–1890) British explorer, geographer, translator, writer, soldier, orientalist, cartographer, ethnologist, spy, lin…

The Kasîdah of Hâjî Abdû El-Yezdî (1870)

Life , World

“I am the girl you know, can't look you in the eye
I am the girl you know so sick I cannot try
I am the one you want, can't look you in the eye
I am the girl you know, I lie and lie and lie”

Courtney Love (1964) American punk singer-songwriter, musician, actress, and artist

"Miss World"
Song lyrics, Live Through This (1994)

Girl

“You lie!”

Joe Wilson (U.S. politician)

Outburst during President Barack Obama's address to a joint session of Congress (September 9, 2009). Alex Isenstadt, "Resolution of disapproval passed" http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0909/27194.html, Politico, 15 September 2009. "Raising a Question of the Privileges of the House", H.R. 744 http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Raising_a_Question_of_the_Privileges_of_the_House, Congressional Record: 15 September 2009, pp. H9529-H9534.

“It's truly a lie, I counterfeit myself.”

Josh Homme (1973) American musician

"I'm Designer", Era Vulgaris (2007)
Lyrics, Queens of the Stone Age

“Let’s move on to the next major lie in my opening statement, the idea of Putin’s popularity in Russia. I could not begin to count the number of times I’ve been forced to address this myth, the persistence of which I again attribute to our lack of language to describe modern dictatorships. Terms like “polls” and “popularity” as applied to politicians in the free world have very different meanings in authoritarian regimes. I’m fond of asking in response to questions about Putin’s “popularity” if a restaurant is popular if it’s the only one in town and every other restaurant was burned to the ground.”

Garry Kasparov (1963) former chess world champion

2010s, The Truth About Putin (2018)

World , Idea , Question , Time

“In the larger view the major forces of the depression now lie outside of the United States, and our recuperation has been retarded by the unwarranted degree of fear and apprehension created by these outside forces.”

Herbert Hoover (1874–1964) 31st President of the United States of America

Herbert Hoover, 1874-1964 (1971)

Fear

“All these troubles revolve around the irritable mutual dependence of life and art – with their need and contempt for one another. Of necessity, to create is a temporary state and cannot be possessed, because you learn and relearn that it is the lie and mask of Art and, too, its mortification, which promise a continuity. There are twenty crucial minutes in the evolution of each of my paintings. The closer I get to that time - those twenty minutes – the more intensely subjective I become – bit the more objective, too. Your eye gets sharper, you become continuously more and more critical. There is no measure I can hold on..”

Phillip Guston (1913–1980) American artist

1961 - 1980, ARTnews Annual', October 1966

Life , Art , Learning , Time

“I refuse for this to be true. Some things even I can't survive. I utter my first words since my sister's death. "I don't believe you."
Snow shakes his head in mock disappointment. "Oh, my dear Miss Everdeen. I thought we had agreed not to lie to each other."”

Suzanne Collins (1962) American television writer and novelist

Katniss and President Snow (p. 358)
The Hunger Games trilogy, Mockingjay (2010)

Death , Disappointment , Sister

“"Well, maybe I'm a latent homosexual." He considered that for a moment. "Or maybe I'm a latent heterosexual. Anyway, I'm pretty latent. I don't know why. Of course, I've taken a number of stabs at it, but then I start thinking about the futility of it all and I give up. Maybe it's because you're expected to do something and after a certain point all I want to do is lie there and stare at the ceiling."”

Margaret Atwood book The Edible Woman

The Edible Woman (1969)

Thinking

“Hysteria will not help us to solve the problem that confronts us. We overstate the danger when we say that twelve millions seek, because of post-war conditions abroad, to come immediately to America. Ending June 30, 1914, the year's immigration figures were 1,218,480. Then came the war and a vast slump, from which we are just recovering. Calculations placed immigration statistics for the current year as 1,079,428—figures still below the prewar status. But even though we need have no grave fears, now is the time for a careful reexamination and revision of our immigration policies. We should have no more aliens to cope with, in the immediate months to come, than our institutions are able to handle. To assume burdens we can not easily meet would lie unfair both to us and to the alien. In protecting ourselves we are protecting him as well. We can not lower our standards, or allow them to be lowered, so as to include him. We must prepare him for our standards. And that means wise education. In the home, in the school, in industry, in citizenship, we have not heretofore applied thoroughly the human test, and that is our next step in the Americanization of the alien. Much work has yet to be done in the immediate months to come. Some protective measure, therefore, seems necessary.”

Calvin Coolidge (1872–1933) American politician, 30th president of the United States (in office from 1923 to 1929)

1920s, Whose Country Is This? (1921)

War , Education , Fear , School

“Earth gets its price for what Earth gives us;
The beggar is taxed for a corner to die in,
The priest hath his fee who comes and shrives us,
We bargain for the graves we lie in;
At the Devil's booth are all things sold
Each ounce of dross costs its ounce of gold.”

James Russell Lowell (1819–1891) American poet, critic, editor, and diplomat

Prelude to Pt. I, st. 3
The Vision of Sir Launfal (1848)

“I knew all the time I was going to get through the war. It was completely irrational, a silly idea, but I was not going to lie down and get myself killed. I was going to get out of it.”

Abraham Pais (1918–2000) American Physicist

Source: To Save a Life: Stories of Holocaust Rescue (2000), p. 50

War , Idea , Time

“I went in thinking: "I'm not going to find out that Darwinism is a fraud. I'll probably find out these (intelligent design proponents) are frauds." But I wound up knowing a lot more than when I started. I learned that Darwinism is being overhyped, and that it doesn't really convey what's going on. Sometimes if you follow a "truth" far enough, it becomes a lie.”

Ben Stein (1944) actor, writer, commentator, lawyer, teacher, humorist

Truth , Intelligence , Fraud , Thinking

“An easy way for the government to create criminality where there is none is to make it a crime to lie to its agents, in this case the FBI, which is Deep State Central.”

Ilana Mercer South African writer

" The Non-Crime of Lying To The FBI, https://mises.org/wire/non-crime-lying-fbi" Mises.org, December 11, 2017
2010s, 2017

Way

“Make believin in forever
Is just a lie.
And it seems a little sadder
Each time we try.
'Cause it's a shame to make
The same mistakes again,
And again.
It's over.
Nobody wins.”

Kris Kristofferson (1936) American country music singer, songwriter, musician, and film actor

Nobody Wins
Song lyrics, Jesus Was a Capricorn (1972)

Time

“Distortive or even totally false reporting on communally sensitive issues is a well-entrenched feature of Indian journalism. There is no self-corrective mechanism in place to remedy this endemic culture of disinformation. No reporter or columnist or editor ever gets fired or formally reprimanded or even just criticized by his peers for smearing Hindus. This way, a partisan economy with the truth has become a habit hard to relinquish. And foreign correspondents used to trusting their Indian secularist sources have likewise developed a habit of swallowing and relaying highly distorted news stories. Usually, the creation of a false impression of the Indian communal situation is achieved without outright lies, relying rather on the silent treatment for inconvenient facts and a screaming overemphasis on convenient ones. (…) So, moral of the story: feel free to write lies about the Hindus. Even if you are found out, most of the public will never hear of it, and you will not be made to bear any consequences.(…) These days, noisy secularists lie in waiting for communal riots and elatedly jump at them when and where they erupt. They exploit the anti-Hindu propaganda value of riots to the hilt, making up fictional stories as they go along to compensate for any defects in the true account. John Dayal is welcomed to Congressional committees in Washington DC as a crown witness to canards such as how Hindus are raping Catholic nuns in Jhabua, an allegation long refuted in a report by the Congress state government of Madhya Pradesh and more recently in the court verdict on the matter. Arundhati Roy goes lyrical about the torture of a Muslim politician's two daughters by Hindus during the Gujarat riots of 2002, even when the man had only one daughter, who came forward to clarify that she happened to be in the US at the time of the “facts.””

Koenraad Elst (1959) orientalist, writer

Harsh Mander has already been condemned by the Press Council of India for spreading false rumours about alleged Hindu atrocities in his famous column Hindustan Hamara. Teesta Setalwad has reportedly pressured eyewitnesses to give the desired incriminating testimony against Hindus in the Gujarat riots.
K. Elst: Religious Cleansing of Hindus, 2004, Agni conference in The Hague, in The Problem with Secularism (2007)
2000s, The Problem with Secularism (2007)

Truth , Way , Feeling , Communication