Source: The Future As History (1960), Chapter III, Part 9, The Embrarras De Richesses, p. 150
“Cover-ups and deception are the nature of this society. Without lies it won’t exist.”
2000-09, Our Duty Is to Remember Sichuan, 2009
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Ai Weiwei 218
Chinese concept artist 1957Related quotes
“A society can exist - many do exist - without writing, but no society can exist without reading.”
The Last Page, p. 7.
A History of Reading (1996)

“A society without the means to detect lies and theft soon squanders its liberty and freedom.”

Harry Potter in Ch. 65 http://www.fanfiction.net/s/5782108/65/Harry_Potter_and_the_Methods_of_Rationality
Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality (2010 - 2015)
Context: Lies propagate, that’s what I’m saying. You’ve got to tell more lies to cover them up, lie about every fact that’s connected to the first lie. And if you kept on lying, and you kept on trying to cover it up, sooner or later you’d even have to start lying about the general laws of thought. Like, someone is selling you some kind of alternative medicine that doesn’t work, and any double-blind experimental study will confirm that it doesn’t work. So if someone wants to go on defending the lie, they’ve got to get you to disbelieve in the experimental method. Like, the experimental method is just for merely scientific kinds of medicine, not amazing alternative medicine like theirs. Or a good and virtuous person should believe as strongly as they can, no matter what the evidence says. Or truth doesn’t exist and there’s no such thing as objective reality. A lot of common wisdom like that isn’t just mistaken, it’s anti-epistemology, it’s systematically wrong. Every rule of rationality that tells you how to find the truth, there’s someone out there who needs you to believe the opposite. If you once tell a lie, the truth is ever after your enemy; and there’s a lot of people out there telling lies.
“When I have ceased to exist, I won’t ever have existed.”
Voces (1943)

Collected Works, Vol. 31, pp. 267–69.
Collected Works