Semiotics

"Sin has many tools, but a lie is the handle which fits them all."

"'Tis as easy as lying."

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

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

"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."

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

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

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

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

"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."

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

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

"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)"

"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."

"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."

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

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

"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!"

"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."

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

"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."

"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."

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

"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."

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

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

"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."

"Children and fooles can not ly."

"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."

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

"Whose tongue soe'er speaks false, Not truly speaks; who speaks not truly, lies."

"Ideas have consequences, and so do lies."

"Lying is such a central characteristic of life that better understanding of it is relevant to almost all human affairs. Some might shudder at that statement, because they view lying as reprehensible."

"Fire is to represent truth because it destroys all sophistry and lies; and the mask is for lying and falsehood which conceal truth."

"What I have termed micro expressions, very fast facial movements lasting less than one-fifth of a second, are one important source of leakage, revealing an emotion a person is trying to conceal. A false expression can be betrayed in a number of ways: it is usually very slightly asymmetrical, and it lacks smoothness in the way it flows on and off the face."

"Mankind are not held together by lies. Trust is the foundation of society. Where there is no truth, there can be no trust, and where there is no trust, there can be no society. Where there is society, there is trust, and where there is trust, there is something upon which it is supported."

"To lie is so vile, that even if it were in speaking well of godly things it would take off something from God's grace; and Truth is so excellent, that if it praises but small things they become noble."

"It is not a lie to keep the truth to oneself."

"Beyond a doubt truth bears the same relation to falsehood as light to darkness; and this truth is in itself so excellent that, even when it dwells on humble and lowly matters, it is still infinitely above uncertainty and lies, disguised in high and lofty discourses; because in our minds, even if lying should be their fifth element, this does not prevent that the truth of things is the chief nutriment of superior intellects, though not of wandering wits. But you who live in dreams are better pleased by the sophistical reasons and frauds of wits in great and uncertain things, than by those reasons which are certain and natural and not so far above us."

"I tell him, if a clergyman, he lies! If captains the remark, or critics, make, Why they lie also—under a mistake."

"Lying is the same as alcoholism. Liars prevaricate even on their deathbeds."

"And, after all, what is a lie? 'Tis but The truth in masquerade."

"A small lie needs a bodyguard of bigger lies to protect it."

"Resolved to die in the last dyke of prevarication."

"All full of lies."

"Can you hear them? They talk about us, telling lies. Well, that's no surprise."

"Quoth Hudibras, I smell a rat; Ralpho, thou dost prevaricate."

"LIAR, n. A lawyer with a roving commission."

"If a lie is only printed often enough, it becomes a quasi-truth, and if such a truth is repeated often enough, it becomes an article of belief, a dogma, and men will die for it."