Vices

"The only reason why we are always thinking of our own ego is that we have to live with it more continuously than with anyone else's."

"Most people are indifferent, unless their self-interest is at stake. Then there are the chronic complainers."

"Where all are selfish, the sage is no better than the fool, and only rather more dangerous."

"The main causes of disharmony are based on selfishness, possessiveness, intolerance, separativeness and the lack of love... The main underlying principle [of goodwill and right human relations] is that man should be taught to relinquish the purely selfish attitude, and to develop the altruistic outlook, which is a soul quality, and therefore lies dormant in each and every man, and only needs awakening."

"And, for the largest-hearted of us, what is the word we write most often in our cheque-books? "Self.""

"Since the world does not really believe in God, in the long run the God-fearing person must really love himself. The God-fearing person does not love what the world loves, but then what is left—God and himself. The world takes God away, and therefore the God-fearing person loves himself. The world regards the fear of God as self-love."

"The deva asked, What causes ruin in the world? What breaks off friendships? What is the most violent fever? Who is the best physician?" The Blessed One replied, Ruin in the world is caused by ignorance; friendships are broken off by envy and selfishness; the most violent fever is hatred; the best physician is the Buddha."

"We must annihilate the feelings of "I - ness" and "my - ness" from our minds. You must march forward like a soldier, dutifully and bravely. The thing which brings man down is "attachment" to his own kith and kin. When all belong to this whole universe, where is the place for "I" and "mine"?"

"SELFISH, adj. Devoid of consideration for the selfishness of others."

"There can be no Good Will. Will is always Evil; it is persecution to others or selfishness."

"Now this was the sin of your sister Sodom: She and her daughters were arrogant, overfed and unconcerned; they did not help the poor and needy."

"Selfishness and demagoguery take advantage of liberty. The selfish hand constantly seeks to control government, and every increase of governmental power, even to meet just needs, furnishes opportunity for abuse and stimulates the effort to bend it to improper uses."

"For too long in this society, we have celebrated unrestrained individualism over common community. For too long as a nation, we have been lulled by the anthem of self-interest."

"I am not sure that it is best for us, once safe and secure on the Rock of Ages, to ask ourselves too closely what this and that experience may signify. Is it not better to be thinking of the Rock, not of the feet that stand upon it?"

"Extreme self-lovers will set a man's house on fire, though it were but to roast their eggs."

"To reside in someone's memory, one must set aside selfishness, as selfishness and fond memories cannot coexist in the same space."

"Beware of no man more than of yourself; we carry our worst enemies within us."

"If we look only to self even in spiritual things, it is still selfishness though possibly on a somewhat higher plane than before."

"Your bait of falsehood takes this carp of truth."

"'Tis as easy as lying."

"These lies are like the father that begets them; gross as a mountain, open, palpable."

"To lapse in fulness Is sorer than to lie for need, and falsehood Is worse in kings than beggars."

"The Book of Daniel is especially fitted to be a battle-ground between faith and unbelief. It admits of no half-way measures. It is either Divine or an imposture. To write any book under the name of another, and to give it out to be his, is, in any case, a forgery, dishonest in itself, and destructive of all trustworthiness. But the case as to the Book of Daniel, if it were not his, would go far beyond even this. The writer, were he not Daniel, must have lied on a most frightful scale."

"The first thing a man will do for his ideals is lie."

"Lord, Lord, how this world is given to lying! I grant you I was down and out of breath; and so was he: but we rose both at an instant and fought a long hour by Shrewsbury clock."

"He will lie, sir, with such volubility, that you would think truth were a fool."

"There's a lot of lying in modern finance. ... I don't like lying."

"If there is a punishment for telling the truth, then many people will tell lies. If telling lies is incentivized, then many people will tell lies. And if you allow mobs of people online or off to intimidate people and don’t stand up to them, then many people will be intimidated. And they will change what they say accordingly."

"By telling a single lie to oneself or to another, by denying a single fact of the world as it has been created, one adds to the World’s Pain."

"Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbour."

"False words are not only evil in themselves, but they infect the soul with evil."

"For no falsehood can endure Touch of celestial temper."

"What’s the cadet motto at West Point? You will not lie, cheat, or steal, or tolerate those who do. I was the CIA director. We lied, we cheated, we stole. It’s — it was like — we had entire training courses. It reminds you of the glory of the American experiment. — Texas A&M University (April 15, 2019)"

"For my part, if a lie may do thee grace, I'll gild it with the happiest terms I have."

"By a lie a man throws away and, as it were, annihilates his dignity as a man. A man who himself does not believe what he tells another […] has even less worth than if he were a mere thing […] makes himself a mere deceptive appearance of man, not man himself."

"His supposed mythomania [of Diego Rivera] 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."

"Drummond: All shine, and no substance! Bert, whenever you see something bright, shining, perfect-seeming—all gold, with purple spots—look behind the paint! And if it’s a lie—show it up for what it really is!"

"One tells as few lies as possible only by telling as few lies as possible, and not by having the least possible opportunity to do so."

"Trump undermines the free press because he wants to be the only legitimate source of information in society. He lies all the time to break down the processes by which we discern the truth about the world around us, and compile the observations and facts which make up the tapestry of reality. He has exposed the paper-thin vulnerability of our democratic society, which depends mightily on observing social norms—like yielding to shame—and a shared acceptance of some common set of truths.The American president is determined to bulldoze this architecture of social structures, and usher in an era where force, not deliberation and cooperation, determines the path our society will take. If he never acknowledges any truth besides his own, he never has to do anything outside his own direct interests. He does not have to actually respond to any kind of criticism, or ever reconsider his course of action. Relentless lying, after all, is a form of coercion, in which you bend others to your will by forcing them to accept the infrastructure of your false reality—or to give up caring whether anything is true or false in the first place. Don't believe your eyes and ears. Everybody was cheering for me."

"You are of your father the devil, and your will is to do your father’s desires. He was a murderer from the beginning, and does not stand in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks out of his own character, for he is a liar and the father of lies."

"A lie is no less a lie because it is a thousand years old."

"Education has paralleled the life of prospering white America: it has been characterized by reverence for efficiency, cultivation of competence unattended by concern for aim, big white lies, and the mainly successful blackout of Black life."

"We discovered there were some Eastern Europeans who could defeat the polygraph at any time. Americans are not very good at it, because we are raised to tell the truth and when we lie it is easy to tell we are lying. But we find a lot of Europeans and Asiatics can handle that polygraph without a blip, and you know they are lying and you have evidence that they are lying."

"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."

"Half the world knows not how the other half lies."

"Show me a liar, and I will show thee a thief."

"As we all know, the most effective lies are the ones sprinkled with the most actual truths."

"My body aches from mistakes betrayed by lust We lied to each other so much that in nothing we trust."

"Lord, Lord, how subject we old men are to the vice of lying!"

"Children and fooles can not ly."