Lies Quotes

“The truth may be out there, but the lies are inside your head.”
― Terry Pratchett

“Anger at lies lasts forever. Anger at truth can't last.”
― Greg Evans

“If it is necessary sometimes to lie to others, it is always despicable to lie to oneself.”
― W. Somerset Maugham, The Painted Veil

“The terrified men did not move. Then Nadia Fedin did something instinctive; she drew her Nagant revolver and fired three short bursts into the head of the nearest soldier. Stepan Ivanovich’s skull burst like a ripe cabbage showering his horrified comrades with viscous brain and bits of bone.”
― KGE Konkel, Who Has Buried the Dead?: From Stalin to Putin … The last great secret of World War Two

“At times to be silent is to lie. You will win because you have enough brute force. But you will not convince. For to convince you need to persuade. And in order to persuade you would need what you lack: Reason and Right”
― Miguel de Unamuno

“There's a difference between playing and playing games. The former is an act of joy, the latter — an act.”
― Vera Nazarian, The Perpetual Calendar of Inspiration

“The lies we tell other people are nothing to the lies we tell ourselves.”
― Derek Landy, Death Bringer

“It is only prudent never to place complete confidence in that by which we have even once been deceived.”
― René Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy

“The more you defend a lie, the angrier you become.”
― Mitch Albom, For One More Day

“There were lies we told to save ourselves, and then there were lies we told to rescue others. What counted more, the mistruth, or the greater good?”
― Jodi Picoult, Handle with Care

“He didn't want to give the cartel any time to persuade Emiliana into accepting a more enticing offer. He had reservations about her loyalty and feared she might make a deal without Elpidio's consent.”
― Carolyn M. Bowen, Legacy of Shadows: An International Crime Thriller

“I believe in my mask-- The man I made up is me
I believe in my dance-- And my destiny”
― Sam Shepard

“Humility is nothing but truth, and pride is nothing but lying.”
― St. Vincent de Paul

“Reality Check
His lying is not contigent on who you are or what you do. His lying is not your fault. Lying is his choice and his problem, and if he makes that choice with you, he will make it with any other woman he’s with. That doesn’t mean you’re an angel and he’s the devil. It does mean that if he doesn’t like certain things about you, he has many ways to address them besides lying. If there are sexual problems between you, there are many resources available to help you. Nothing can change until you hold him responsible and accountable for lying and stop blaming yourself.

The lies we tell ourselves to keep from seeing the truth about our lovers don’t feel like lies. They feel comfortable, familiar, and true. We repeat them like a mantra and cling to them like security blankets, hoping to calm ourselves and regain our sense that the world works the way we believe it ought to.
Self-lies are false friends we look to for comfort and protection—and for a short time they may make us feel better. But we can only keep the truth at bay for so long. Our self-lies can’t erase his lies, and as we’ll see, the longer we try to pretend they can, the more we deepen the hurt.”
― Susan Forward

“A harp can be a dangerous as a sword, in the right hands.”
― George R.R. Martin, A Storm of Swords

“What happens to people living in a society where everyone in power is lying, stealing, cheating and killing, and in our hearts we all know this, but the consequences of facing all these lies are so monstrous, we keep on hoping that maybe the corporate government administration and media are on the level with us this time.
Americans remind me of survivors of domestic abuse.
This is always the hope that this is the very, very, very last time one's ribs get re-broken again. ”
― Inga Muscio, Cunt: A Declaration of Independence

“Cathy's lies were never innocent. Their purpose was to escape punishment, or work, or responsibility, and they were used for profit. Most liars are tripped up either because they forget what they have told or because the lie is suddenly faced with an incontrovertible truth. But Cathy did not forget her lies, and she developed the most effective method of lying. She stayed close enough to the truth so that one could never be sure. She knew two other methods also -- either to interlard her lies with truth or to tell a truth as though it were a lie. If one is accused of a lie and it turns out to be the truth, there is a backlog that will last a long time and protect a number of untruths.”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden

“Lies don't end relationships the truth does.”
― Shannon L. Alder

“The naked truth is always better than the best-dressed lie.”
― Ann Landers

“A tiding of magpies: One for sorrow, two for joy, three for a girl, four for a boy, five for silver, six for gold, seven for a secret never to be told”
― Paula Hawkins, The Girl on the Train

“The most dangerous of all falsehoods is a slightly distorted truth.”
― Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, The Waste Books

“Religion is like a blind man looking in a black room for a black cat that isn't there, and finding it.”
― Anonymous

“Most people gaze neither into the past nor the future; they explore neither truth nor lies. They gaze at the television.”
― Radiohead

“You know there's no such thing as a complete lie. There's always some truth in there.”
― David Levithan, Will Grayson, Will Grayson

“Only the magic and the dream are true — all the rest's a lie.”
― Jean Rhys

“As the poets say, stories are truth told through lies.”
― Jessica Khoury, The Forbidden Wish

“If we could believe that he [Jesus] really countenanced the follies, the falsehoods, and the charlatanism which his biographers [Gospels] father on him, and admit the misconstructions, interpolations, and theorizations of the fathers of the early, and the fanatics of the latter ages, the conclusion would be irresistible by every sound mind that he was an impostor... We find in the writings of his biographers matter of two distinct descriptions. First, a groundwork of vulgar ignorance, of things impossible, of superstitions, fanaticisms and fabrications... That sect [Jews] had presented for the object of their worship, a being of terrific character, cruel, vindictive, capricious and unjust... Jesus had to walk on the perilous confines of reason and religion: and a step to right or left might place him within the gripe of the priests of the superstition, a blood thirsty race, as cruel and remorseless as the being whom they represented as the family God of Abraham, of Isaac and of Jacob, and the local God of Israel. They were constantly laying snares, too, to entangle him in the web of the law... That Jesus did not mean to impose himself on mankind as the son of God, physically speaking, I have been convinced by the writings of men more learned than myself in that lore.

[Letter to William Short, 4 August, 1820]”
― Thomas Jefferson, Letters of Thomas Jefferson

“Lies 1: There is only the present and nothing to remember.

Lies 2: Time is a straight line.

Lies 3: The difference between the past and the future is that one has happened while the other has not.

Lies 4: We can only be in one place at a time.

Lies 5: Any proposition that contains the word 'finite' (the world, the universe, experience, ourselves...)

Lies 6: Reality as something which can be agreed upon.

Lies 7: Reality is truth.”
― Jeanette Winterson, Sexing the Cherry

“Promises are lies wrapped in pretty ribbons -Cinnamon”
― VC Andrews

“There are different ways to be confused about how someone's disappointed you. Some lie about the future because they wanted to forget the past. But some will lie about the past because they think it will give you both a future.”
― Laura Dave, The Divorce Party