“Corrupt men are always liars. Lies are their instruments, their pleasure, their solace. In time they come to believe their lies, or rather to half-believe them.”
The Corruptions of Our Time, p. 249
The Corrupt Society - From Ancient Greece To Present-Day America (1975)
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Pierre Stephen Robert Payne 28
British lecturer, novelist, historian, poet and biographer 1911–1983Related quotes
“Lies are lies, but all lies have their moment to be believed.”
Las mentiras son las mentiras, pero todo tiene su tiempo para ser creído.
Source: Tu rostro mañana, 1. Fiebre y lanza [Your Face Tomorrow, Vol. 1: Fever and Spear] (2002), p. 179
“In a world of lies and liars, an honest work of art is always an act of social responsibility.”
Source: Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting
As quoted in Land Your Dream Job : High-Performance Techniques to Get Noticed, Get Hired, and Get Ahead (2007) by John Middleton, Ken Langdon, and Nikki Cartwright
“Celebrities are invariably celebrity-mad, just as liars always believe liars.”
Source: 1990s, Palimpsest : A Memoir (1995), Ch. 18: To Do Well What Should Not Be Done at All, p. 311
A Body in the Bath House
“The visionary lies to himself, the liar only to others.”
"Lies and consequences." in The American Prospect (19 May 2002) http://prospect.org/cs/articles?article=lies_and_consequences&gId=6282
Context: To rationalize their lies, people — and the governments, churches, or terrorist cells they compose — are apt to regard their private interests and desires as just. Clinton may have lied to preserve his power while telling himself that he was lying to protect “the people” who benefited from his presidency. Liars — especially liars in power — often conflate their interest with the public interest. (What’s good for General Motors is good for the United States.) Or they consider their lies sanctified by the essential goodness they presume to embody, like terrorists who believe that murder is sanctified by the godliness of their aspirations. Sanctimony probably engenders at least as much lying as cynicism. We can’t condemn lying categorically, but we should categorically suspect it.