Top 100 Great Lie Quotes
#1. The great lie is that it is civilization. It's not civilized. It has been literally the most blood thirsty brutalizing system ever imposed upon this planet. That is not civilization. That's the great lie, is that it represents civilization.
John Trudell
#3. Socrates said the perfect society would be based on a great lie. People would be told that lie from the cradle, and they would believe it, because human beings need to make order out of chaos.
Anne Frasier
#5. But no sooner had morning broken than he took hold of his whip and ceremoniously stepped out to address his slaves. Each blow was liberating, it was like unshaking proof of the great lie of God's existence.
Juhani Peltonen
#6. I wish to Christ I could make up a really great lie. Sometimes, after an interview, I say to myself, 'Man, you were so honest - can't you have some fun? Can't you do some really down and dirty lying?' But the puritan in me thinks that if I tell a lie, I'll be punished.
Willem Dafoe
#7. Man has much power of discourse which for the most part is vain and false; animals have but little, but it is useful and true, and a small truth is better than a great lie.
Leonardo Da Vinci
#8. You lie," he said. "All men lie when they are afraid. Some tell many lies, some but a few. Some have only one great lie they tell so often that they almost come to believe it ... though some small part of them will always know that it is still a lie, and that will show upon their faces.
George R R Martin
#9. We of Es Toch tell a little myth, which says that in the beginning the Creator told a great lie. For there was nothing at all, but the Creator spoke, saying, It exists. And behold, in order that the lie of God might be God's truth, the universe at once began to exist.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#10. If you tell yourself the great lie of bad art-that you are in charge-your chance at the truth will be lost. The truth isn't always pretty.
Stephen King
#11. A great lie is like a great fish on dry land; it may fret and fling and make a frightful bother, but it cannot hurt you. You have only to keep still, and it will die of itself.
George Crabbe
#13. No one knows anything about economics. It's the great lie of the economists. By contrast in football people might have contrasting opinions, each of which has some validity. But the economists always speak in conditionals - what a mess.
Vicente Del Bosque
#14. In this nonfundamentalist understanding of faith, practice is more important than theory, love more important than law, and mystery is seen as an insight into truth rather than an obstacle. It is the great lie of our time that all religious faith has to be fundamentalist to be valid.
Andrew Sullivan
#15. A lie is troublesome, and sets a man's invention upon the rack, and one trick needs a great many more to make it good.
Richard Steele
#16. Worn out by suffering, we lie on our great backs, tossing grass up to heaven - as a distraction, not a prayer. That's not humility you see on our long final journeys: it's procrastination. It hurts my heavy body to lie down. - DAN CHIASSON, The Elephant
Jodi Picoult
#17. Oh for 'Shael's sweet sake, girl, you think you can rule an empire without lying? You think your father didn't lie? Or his father? Or any of your goldy-eyed great-great-founders of Annur? It's built into the job. Bakers have flour, fishermen have nets, and leaders have lies.
Brian Staveley
#18. Everything that surrounds us becomes part of us, it seeps into us with every experience of the flesh and of life and, like the web of a great Spider, binds us subtly to what is near, ensnares us in a fragile cradle of slow death, where we lie rocking in the wind.
Fernando Pessoa
#19. I've got a song on One Direction's album called 'Tell Me A Lie'. It's a really cute song - I love it. I loved that they liked it. They sound really great on it. I already have it - I'm so VIP with my copy on my computer! It does sound really good.
Kelly Clarkson
#21. I might be a great liar, but I am not sure I can lie to those striking eyes.
M.F. Moonzajer
#22. The truth is that trout fishermen scheme and lie and toss in their sleep. They dream of great dripping trout, shapely and elusive as mermaids, and arise cranky and haggard from their fantasies. They are moody and neglectful and all of them a little daft. Moreover they are inclined to drink too much.
John D. Voelker
#23. Let us unlearn our wisdom of the world. Let us lie low in the Lord's power, and learn that truth alone makes rich and great.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#24. When it comes to belts and rank, I don't care what belt I am; I don't care what rank I am. I'm proud that I've achieved high ranks through some great instructors around the world, but ultimately, the mat doesn't lie.
Jason David Frank
#25. Every time I come home, it is the same great pleasure to lie down in my bed. That's when I think, 'home sweet home.'
Sigrid Agren
#26. Whales in mid-ocean, suspended in the waves of the sea great heaven of whales in the waters, old hierarchies. And enormous mother whales lie dreaming suckling their whale-tender young and dreaming with strange whale eyes wide open in the waters of the beginning and the end.
D.H. Lawrence
#27. I started off thinking Eminem was a flash in the pan, a kind of hip-hop Hanson brother. How wrong I was. Recovery is sometimes funny, sometimes terrible, always painfully honest. The matching of Eminem and Rihanna on "Love the Way You Lie" is pure genius. "Not Afraid" is pretty great too.
Stephen King
#28. Sitting tightens your chest. For a great release, lie faceup on a foam roller placed lengthwise under your spine, and stretch your arms out to your side.
Mary Whipple
#29. We get back pretty well. There is no further attack by the enemy. We lie for an hour panting and resting before anyone speaks. We are so completely played out that in spite of our great hunger we do not think of the provisions. Then gradually we become something like men again.
Erich Maria Remarque
#30. I truly believe the brightest days lie ahead for the Great State of Hawaii.
Linda Lingle
#31. Just to lie here in the sun with great white peaks all around me and the biggest glacier in Europe at my feet, to eat from time to time, to sleep a little and dream a great deal- it is a heavenly existence.
George Leigh Mallory
#33. This grace of God is a very great, strong, mighty and active thing. It does not lie asleep in the soul. Grace hears, leads, drives, draws, changes, works all in man, and lets itself be distinctly felt and experienced. It is hidden, but its works are evident.
Martin Luther
#34. The desire for knowledge is so great and it works in such a way that the human heart, despite its experience of insurmountable limitation, yearns for the infinite riches which lie beyond, knowing that there is to be found the satisfying answer to every question as yet unanswered.
Pope John Paul II
#35. When the enemies of Spire Albion were in the walls, the great-great granddaughter of old Admiral Tagwynn had refused to have a good lie-down, and it was as simple and as profound as that.
Jim Butcher
#36. The problem doesn't lie with the great teachers. Great teachers strive to create linchpins. The problem lies with the system that punishes artists and rewards bureaucrats instead. Here
Seth Godin
#37. I would not be a rose upon the wall
A queen might stop at, near the palace-door,
To say to a courtier, "Pluck that rose for me,
It's prettier than the rest." O Romney Leigh!
I'd rather far be trodden by his foot,
Than lie in a great queen's bosom.
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
#38. Sex murders were usually the work of psychopaths and with that psychology was an innate ability to lie, to act, to feign surprise and horror when it was needed. Psychopaths were great liars.
Michael Connelly
#39. Great and terrible systems of divinity and philosophy lie round about us, which, if true, might drive a wise man mad.
Walter Bagehot
#40. Those writers who lie on the watch for novelty can have little hope of greatness; for great things cannot have escaped former observation.
Samuel Johnson
#41. So great was the noise during the day that I used to lie awake at night listening to silence.
Muriel Spark
#42. I'm beginning to think you're the sort of person who does a great deal with very little.
He meant a liar.
Jasper Fforde
#43. Mourn not the dead that in the cool earth lie, but rather mourn the apathetic, throng the coward and the meek who see the world's great anguish and its wrong, and dare not speak.
Ralph Chaplin
#44. Maybe I should lie down on a table in the workroom and wait to see if he welds something to me." "I think that's the way most great love stories begin.
Leigh Bardugo
#45. From the beginning, nothing has been more alien, repugnant, and hostile to woman than truth
her great art is the lie, her highest concern is mere appearance of beauty.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#46. He who tells a lie is not sensible of how great a task he undertakes; for he must be forced to invent twenty more to maintain that one.
Alexander Pope
#47. How the fuck do I know that my better is anything more than the great big fat lie we tell ourselves to justify the slow fat nothing of our days.
Claire North
#48. I'm in no hurry to do anything. I'll probably lie here for the rest of the day. (Great term, that, 'rest of the day'.)
Fennel Hudson
#49. Every great religion on the planet, regardless of what spiritual or cultural tradition from which it is that it emerges, announces and declares that spiritual mastery is an open possibility for every member of the human race. If that is not true, then the highest promise of God is a lie.
Neale Donald Walsch
#50. The fable of us had been rewritten. With a spin that had exposed the truth. Instead of the happily never after we'd been dealt or with the happily ever after that was a lie, we were retelling the ending. Boone and Clara - happily even after. It was a great story. The greatest one I'd ever heard.
Nicole Williams
#51. I went to the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama, which was great but very different from a typical university. They sat us down in the first week and said: if you want to party, you've come to the wrong place. There was no lie-ins or skipping lectures.
Kimberley Nixon
#52. In that temple of silence and reconciliation where the enmities of twenty generations lie buried, in the great Abbey which has during many ages afforded a quiet resting-place to those whose minds and bodies have been shattered by the contentions of the Great Hall.
Thomas B. Macaulay
#53. The grave unites; where e'en the great find rest, And blended lie th' oppressor and th' oppressed!
Alexander Pope
#54. Pretty girls lie at the centre of straight culture, dyke culture, fag culture. They sell everything, they buy everything, they ruin great men and women, and finally they ruin themselves, accidentally, simply by getting old.
Zadie Smith
#55. Never tell an unnecessary lie; the truth has great authority. The cleverest murders have been caught, not because they told the one essential lie, but because they continued to lie about unimportant detail when the truth could have done them no harm.
P.D. James
#56. Inspiration doesn't lie on the sleeves of great leaders, but it is instead hidden in the hearts of the simple souls who seldom show the potential they carry with them.
Sanhita Baruah
#57. Let us fear ourselves. Prejudices are the real robbers; vices are the real murderers. The great dangers lie within ourselves.
Victor Hugo
#58. How great the lie right to the top: We don't torture people in America and people who say we do simply know nothing about our country.
George W. Bush
#59. Let this one great, gracious, glorious fact lie in your spirit until it permeates all your thoughts and makes you rejoice even though you are without strength. Rejoice that the Lord Jesus has become your strength and your song - He has become your salvation.
Charles Spurgeon
#60. Discover the great ideas that lie inside you by discovering the power of sleep.
Arianna Huffington
#61. The prevarication and white lies which a mind that keeps itself ambitiously pure is as uneasy under as a great artist under the false touches that no eye detects but his own, are worn as lightly as mere trimming when once the actions have become a lie.
George Eliot
#62. Of all studies, the most delightful and the most useful is biography. The seeds of great events lie near the surface; historians delve too deep for them. No history was ever true. Lives I have read which, if they were not, had the appearance, the interest, and the utility of truth.
Walter Savage Landor
#63. In this day before sonar, a submarine traveled utterly blind, trusting entirely in the accuracy of sea charts. One great fear of all U-boat men was that a half-sunk derelict or an uncharted rock might lie in their path.
Erik Larson
#64. The charnel ground is that great graveyard in which the complexities of samsara and nirvana lie buried.
Chogyam Trungpa
#65. The great masses of the people will more easily fall victims to a big lie than to a small one.
Adolf Hitler
#66. Abel grabs my shoulders to steady me. "You can do this," he say. "I won't lie. Part of me was hoping you would abandon this but we've come this far. You're special, cousin. You're going to do great things. Just promise me that you won't love it someplace else and leave me here alone.
Celia Mcmahon
#67. We have each other, and our stories twist and mingle like the twisting currents of a river. We hold each other tight as we spin and lurch across our lives. There are moments of great joy and magic. The most astounding things can lie waiting as each day dawns, as each page turns.
David Almond
#68. If we once get above our Bibles and cease making the written Word of God our sole rule both as to faith and practice, we shall soon lie open to all manner of delusion and be in great danger of making shipwreck of faith and a good conscience.
George Whitefield
#69. He explained to me with great insistence that every question posessed a power that did not lie in the answer.
Elie Wiesel
#70. Love is a great thing. It is not by chance that in all times and practically among all cultured peoples love in the general senseand the love of a man for his wife are both called love. If love is often cruel or destructive, the reasons lie not in love itself, but in the inequality between people.
Anton Chekhov
#71. the great thing about lying was people believed it so long as the lie was close enough to the truth. Lena
Karin Slaughter
#72. We are apt to mistake our vocation by looking out of the way for occasions to exercise great and rare virtues, and by stepping over the ordinary ones that lie directly in the road before us.
Hannah More
#73. And guys don't get attached, guys don't give themselves over completely, and guys lie. That's why they should be handled with great trepidation, not trusted, and held at arm's length whenever possible.
Sarah Dessen
#74. I think that what trips up a lot of great musicians is that they become involved with too many things that aren't where their strengths lie.
Will Oldham
#75. If there's no feast for this appetite
No reason in nursery rhymes
Why can't I shake this great and glorious lie?
And if there's no dawn beyond this dark
No secret stair to climb
Where did I learn the song that shakes the sky?
Jeffrey Overstreet
#76. Telling one lie begets another lie that begets another lie and before you know it that lie has grandkids, great grandkids and keeps growing. It's like Lay's Potato Chips, you can't tell just one!
Sanjo Jendayi
#78. We struggle with, agonize over and bluster heroically about the great questions of life when the answers to most of these lie hidden in our attitude toward the thousand minor details of each day.
Robert Grudin
#79. In far-off lands stand the great stones
on which my thoughts rest.
It was a foreigner who wrote the strange words
on the hard board that is called my soul.
Days and nights I lie and think
about things that never happened:
my thirsty soul was once given a drink.
Edith Sodergran
#80. Near that a dusty paint-box, some odd hooks, A half-burnt match, an ivory block, three books, Where conic sections, spherics, logarithms, To great Laplace, from Saunderson and Sims, Lie heaped in their harmonious disarray Of figures,-disentangle them who may.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
#81. Great lovers lie in Hell, the stubborn ones
Infatuate of the flesh upon the bones;
Stuprate, they rend each other when they kiss,
The pieces kiss again, no end to this.
John Crowe Ransom
#83. So then, men may let their great powers lie dormant, while they employ their mean and petty powers on mean and petty objects; but it is physically impossible to employ a great power, except on a great object.
John Ruskin
#84. One of biggest lies in politics is the lie that Republicans are the party of big business. Big business does great with big government. Big business is very happy to climb in bed with big government. Republicans are and should be the party of small business and of entrepreneurs.
Ted Cruz
#85. The weight of the lie was so great it almost didn't escape my lips and barely made it to her ears
V.C. Andrews
#86. You know better than I, Monsieur,' said he, 'that to lie with a girl is only to make her do what pleases her; there is often a great distance between that and making her do what we want.
Pierre-Ambroise Choderlos De Laclos
#87. I used to walk down the street like I was a fucking star ... I want people to walk around delusional about how great they can be - and then to fight so hard for it every day that the lie becomes the truth.
Lady Gaga
#88. Magic is the only profession where it's easy to lie about your talent. If you do a trick and you can learn it very quickly, you can fool somebody into thinking you're a great magician.
David Copperfield
#89. Every gesture, every I love you; all of it was tinted by the great ugly lie underpinning her life.
Katharine McGee
#90. Blessed is he who carries within himself a God, an ideal, and who obeys it: ideal of art, ideal of science, ideal of the gospel virtues, therein lie the springs of great thoughts and great actions; they all reflect light from the Infinite.
Louis Pasteur
#91. Why do politicians lie?
Because people like being lied to.
Just look at any political rally.
P.S. You're great!
Alan VanMeter
#92. Sleep sweetly, tender heart, in peace;Sleep, holy spirit, blessed soul,While the stars burn, the moons increase,And the great ages onward roll. Sleep till the end, true soul and sweet. Nothing comes to thee new or strange. Sleep full of rest from head to feet;Lie still, dry dust, secure of change.
Alfred Lord Tennyson
#93. Make a point never go clear, it is great odds that a man whose habits and the bent of whose mind lie a contrary way, shall be unable to comprehend it. So weak a thing is reason in competition with inclination.
George Berkeley
#94. Apply the lie detector to everything. You will be amazed at how many lies you will discover. Beware tough, you may discover that you are a lie.
Bangambiki Habyarimana
#95. Nothing annoys a 'progressive' like refugees from Communism, who give the lie to the Great Socialist Dream.
Joseph Sobran
#96. I could lie and say my wife cooks for me, but she doesn't. My wife has never learnt cooking but she has great cooks at home.
Shah Rukh Khan
#97. For want of me the world's course will not fail;When all its work is done the lie shall rot;The truth is great and shall prevailWhen none cares whether it prevail or not.
Coventry Patmore
#98. My idea of the perfect exercise class is this: The teacher gives us all a hug and goes, 'You did it! You showed up! Let's lie down.' We all lie down and she's like, 'How is everybody feeling?' We're like, 'Great!' And the teacher's like, 'Great!' Then we all get to leave 20 minutes early.
Amy Poehler
#99. What is a great success? You haven't hurt anyone? That is a great success! You haven't ignored any person? That is a great success! You haven't lied? That is a great success! You haven't deceived a person? That's a great success! And now you see how very difficult to have a real success!
Mehmet Murat Ildan
#100. We would lie on coral sand, below sugary stars,
watching Cassiopeia mount her throne
and the Great Bear wash its paws in the South.
I would say, "I have a secret to tell you."
And, folding me in your arms, boyish and sly,
you would answer: "Whisper it into my mouth.
Diane Ackerman
