Quotes About Telling The Truth And Lying

#1. What are you suggesting I do Ralph?'
'I'm suggesting you tell the bloody truth whatever it is. The only place lying leads is trouble.'
"Sometimes that's the only place telling the truth get you, too.

M.L. Stedman

#2. Make a habit of telling the truth, or make a habit of lying: to decide each case on its own merits is exhausting, and hardly ever worth it.

Mignon McLaughlin

#3. Not telling everything you know is not the same as telling a lie.

Glenda Bailey-Mershon

#4. Unfortunately, as much as I am gullible, I also hate lying. I tend to tell the truth a lot ... lying just isn't worth it. But I think I'm guilty of telling people that I'm 5 minutes away when really I'm about 45 or an hour away.

Monica Raymund

#5. Honesty is more than not lying. It is truth telling, truth speaking, truth living, and truth loving.

James E. Faust

#6. It is, perhaps, a debatable question, whether a person who has always been notoriously in the habit of lying, has a right to tell the truth; it is, of course, the only device by which he can deceive people.

George D. Prentice

#7. To me, horror is when I see somebody lying. I mean a person I know. A friend. And he's telling me something that I accept. And then suddenly, as he or she is telling it, there's something that gives them away. They're not telling me the truth.

Jonathan Frid

#8. Trust grows when people see leaders translate their personal integrity into organizational fidelity. At the heart of fidelity lies truth-telling and promise-keeping.

Max De Pree

#9. I am going to say something I have never said before and this is the truth. I have no reason to lie to you and God knows I am telling the truth. I think all my success and fame and I have wanted it, I have wanted it because I wanted to be loved. That's all. That's the real truth.

Michael Jackson

#10. An unconscious, gentle process whereby people who want to be loving attempt to be so by telling little white lies, by withholding some of the truth about themselves and their feelings in order to avoid conflict. Pseudocommunity is conflict-avoiding; true community is conflict-resolving.

M. Scott Peck

#11. The most direct way has been to ask people how much effort it took them to produce a deceptive or truthful message. People find lying more difficult than truth telling (Caso, Gnisci, Vrij, & Mann, 2005; Vrij, Semin, & Bull, 1996). As

Anonymous

#12. I'm quite a good reader of people; I like to meet people, and I can tell if they're lying or not, and I've certainly had interviews with people in this radio show I've done that swear they've seen things or have had bizarre experiences with creatures, and so I think they're telling the truth.

Rhys Darby

#13. As I got warmed up, and felt perfectly at home in talk, I heard myself boasting, lying, exaggerating. Oh, not deliberately, far from it. It would be unconvivial and dull to stop and arrest the flow of talk, and speak only after carefully considering whether I was telling the truth.

Bernard Berenson

#14. Political correctness is an intellectual sickness. It means lying when telling the truth is not expedient. It is a disgusting habit and yet it is so widespread and so common that it is considered to be normal.

Ali Sina

#15. Whatever we say
We're always telling each other exactly what we want them to know ...
We are always telling each other
The truth
Even when
We're lying

Merrit Malloy

#16. If a liar tells you he is lying, is he telling the truth.

Shehan Karunatilaka

#17. No one believes a liar. Even when she's telling the truth.

Sara Shepard

#18. Yesterday I was lying, today I am telling the truth.

Bob Arum

#19. Their fate rested entirely on me. I could save them by telling the truth. I could destroy them by lying. No one should have that much power.

Neal Shusterman

#20. There were people who lied for gain, people who lied from pain, people who lied simply because the concept of telling the truth was utterly alien to them ... and then there were people who lied because they were waiting for it to be time to tell the truth.

Stephen King

#21. There are two ways of lying. One, not telling the truth and the other, making up statistics.

Josefina Vazquez Mota

#22. Art is lies that tell the truth.

Pablo Picasso

#23. We find it easy to believe that praise is sincere: why should anyone lie in telling us the truth?

Jean Rostand

#24. I am trying to work out what my taste is, comedy-wise. I look up to stand up comedians who appear to be telling the truth, but I don't mind if they are lying.

Jessie Cave

#25. Telling the truth will lead you to freedom; telling the lies will lead you to slavery.

Jamison Green

#26. Still, I find lying to be more dangerous than expertly telling the truth, so I avoid it whenever possible.

Drew Hayes

#27. Sometimes lies are more dependable than the truth.

Orson Scott Card

#28. He tells so many lies that he convinces himself after a while that he's telling the truth. He just doesn't recognize truth or falsehood.

Robert Kennedy

#29. Myths are lies that tell the truth.

Phil Cousineau

#30. Richard Nixon is a no good, lying bastard. He can lie out of both sides of his mouth at the same time, and if he ever caught himself telling the truth, he'd lie just to keep his hand in.

Harry Truman

#31. There was a distinction between lying and telling half-truths, but it was a very narrow one.

Alexander McCall Smith

#32. Everyone's always making fun of him and calling him crazy behind his back, but I can kind of understand how someone would end up that way. I mean, if no one ever pays attention to you telling the truth, then it probably makes sense to try lying for a change.

Amy Reed

#33. Don't be afraid to tell the truth. It's better to hurt someone by truth than to make them happy by lies.

Khaled Hosseini

#34. Don't forget that few people are likely to tell more than a small part of the truth: no one tells much of the truth, let alone the whole truth. Spoken words are facts in themselves, whether true or false. When people talk they reveal themselves, whether they're lying or telling the truth.

Halldor Laxness

#35. Telling one lie almost always requires another, and before the storyteller knows it, they will be caught inside of their own web.

Jenna Alatari

#36. If you tell a lie that's big enough, and you tell it often enough, people will believe you're telling the truth, even if what you're saying is total crap.

Richard Belzer

#37. Science is a set of rules to keep us from telling lies to each other. All scientists really have is a reputation for telling the truth.

Isaac Asimov

#38. Either he's lying, which is bad. Or he could be telling the truth, which is worse

Cinda Williams Chima

#39. Lying is easy. But it's lonely."
"What do you mean?"
"When you lie to everyone about everything, what's left? What's true?"
"Nothing," I say.
"Exactly.

Victoria Schwab

#40. My truth is everyone else's lies. My lies are their comfort. Telling the truth makes people uncomfortable. Who am I to cause anyone discomfort on purpose? Lying works. Lying makes it all better. Lying is my gift to everyone around me. They never even say thank you.

Kathryn Perez

#41. When you have a problem, if you tell the truth, the problem becomes part of your past. If you lie, it becomes part of your future.

Rick Pitino

#42. Lying in one's own way is almost better than telling the truth in someone else's way; in the first case you're a man, and in the second - no better than a bird!

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

#43. We raise the hypothesis that truth telling may be the natural response absent clear motivations to lie (hence, most human communication) and that lying may prevail as the automatic reaction when it brings about important self-profit.

Anonymous

#44. Please explain to me why John Kerry sounds more dickish telling the truth than Bush sounds when he's lying. How is that possible?

Jon Stewart

#45. When men and women punish each other for truth telling, we reinforce the notion that lies are better.

Bell Hooks

#46. People on the Continent either tell you the truth or lie; in England they hardly ever lie, but they would not dream of telling you the truth.

George Mikes

#47. In this play we're dealing with relative truths - who's lying, who's telling the truth. But underneath that, Ed and I have hit this deeper level of intimacy between old friends that comes out in the play.

Fred Ward

#48. All propaganda is lies, even when one is telling the truth.

George Orwell

#49. Lotto once said to her, and she laughed and conceded that she was. She wasn't sure just then if she was telling the truth or if she was lying. Great

Lauren Groff

#50. I've never met or spoken to David Lee Roth, yet it's rather ironic that even he's saying Eddie's lying about things. I'm saying he's not telling the truth, yet Eddie insists that the two of us are lying! You be the judge.

Sammy Hagar

#51. It's a basic truth of the human condition that everybody lies. The only variable is about what. The weird thing about telling someone they're dying is it tends to focus their priorities. You find out what matters to them. What they're willing to die for. What they're willing to lie for.

David Shore

#52. I wanted readers to be genuinely unsure as to whether she's telling the truth or lying. It meant making her partly sympathetic, and partly unsympathetic, which wasn't easy.

Lee Child

#53. In this world of lies, Truth is forced to fly like a scared white doe in the woodlands; and only by cunning glimpses will she reveal herself, as in Shakespeare and other masters of the great Art of Telling the Truth, even though it be covertly, and by snatches.

Herman Melville

#54. People think that a person is scared when he's lying. But the fact is, he is even more scared when he's telling the truth.

Raj Singh

#55. [On Richard M. Nixon:] Americans began with a president who couldn't tell a lie and now they have one who can't tell the truth.

Benazir Bhutto

#56. The problem a guy who lies all the time faces is he never can tell when anybody else is telling the truth.

Deacon Jones

#57. You can't be reluctant to give up your lie and still tell the truth.

Ludwig Wittgenstein

#58. If you think somebody is telling a big lie about you, the only way to answer is with the whole truth.

Harry S. Truman

#59. Journalists are notoriously easy to kid. All you have to do is speak to a journalist in a very serious tone of voice, and he will be certain that you are either telling the truth or a big, important lie.

P. J. O'Rourke

#60. I'll never speak to another person without telling the truth. I've been a cruel man in my time, I've been a devious man in my time, like everybody else. I've told lies in my time. But I've seen enough suffering to experiment with the truth.

Jack Kirby

#61. Worse than telling a lie is spending the rest of your life staying true to a lie.

Robert Breault

#62. Always telling the truth is no doubt better than always lying, although equally pathological.

Robert Breault

#63. Today's comedian has a cross to bear that he built himself. A comedian of the older generation did an act and he told the audience, This is my act. Today's comic is not doing an act. The audience assumes he's telling the truth. What is truth today may be a damn lie next week.

Lenny Bruce

#64. Sometimes you have to lie to tell the truth.

Robert J. Flaherty

#65. There is no such thing as bragging. You're either lying or telling the truth.

Curt Flood

#66. Do we really need a study on why people lie? They lie because it's easy, and cowards are good at "easy." Telling the truth takes moxie, and few have it.

Donna Lynn Hope

#67. There are few reasons for telling the truth, but for lying the number is infinite.

Carlos Ruiz Zafon

#68. Playing the guitar is like telling the truth - you never have to worry about repeating the same [lie] if you told the truth. You don't have to pretend, or cover up. If someone asks you again, you don't have to think about it or worry about it because there it is. It's you.

B.B. King

#69. Repeat a lie a hundred times and it becomes an ideal.

Ljupka Cvetanova

#70. Is not anyone with any degree of mental honesty conscious of telling lies all day long, both in talking and writing, simply because lies will fall into artistic shape when truth will not?

George Orwell

#71. Atticus sometimes said that one way to tell whether a witness was lying or telling the truth was to listen rather than watch.

Harper Lee

#72. But a funny thing happens when you tell a man that you don't want to get married: they don't believe you. They think you're lying to yourself or to them or you're trying to trick them in some way and you end up being made to feel worse for just telling the truth.

Jami Attenberg

#73. If you will refrain from telling any lies about the Republican Party, I'lll promise not to tell the truth about the Democrats.

Chauncey Depew

#74. We reveal more of ourselves in the lies we tell than we do when we try to tell the truth.

Dorothy Salisbury Davis

#75. What is it with you people? You think not getting caught in a lie is the same thing as telling the truth?

Robert Redford

#76. YOU'RE A PATHOLOGICAL TRUTH-TELLER, Lotto once said to her, and she laughed and conceded that she was. She wasn't sure just then if she was telling the truth or if she was lying.

Lauren Groff

#77. I don't care what you meant to do. I really don't.
I only care about what you actually do. That's important. The rest of it is just a bunch of bull shit.
--- Grace.

Christian Kiefer

#78. One can lie with the mouth, but with the accompanying grimace one nevertheless tells the truth.

Friedrich Nietzsche

#79. Lying eats into the soul. If it becomes a habit it frays the edge of your spirit. Truth telling, although sometimes harder to do, strengthens your heart. It serves a person ill not to tell the truth.

Theresa Breslin

#80. If she is given full immunity ... in order to verify that she's telling the truth, which I'm sure she is, I would be happy to submit her to a polygraph examination. Lie detector's not a good word because they can't detect lies.

William H. Ginsburg

#81. With all the justifications I have had in place, telling the truth under certain circumstances was in my universe no different than telling a lie or withholding.

Mike Rinder

#82. I am accountable for every lie that I tell, but I am also accountable for the effects of every harsh truth I deliver.

Richelle E. Goodrich

#83. I am my own judge of what truths I shall tell. The truth can do just as much harm as a lie.

Thornton Wilder

#84. The first step toward telling the truth is to tell the whole lie.

Robert Breault

#85. You put something down and you don't know immediately what it is. It has always been like that ... All you have to know is whether you're lying or whether you're telling the truth, you can't afford to make a mistake about that distinction any longer.

John Berger

#86. Integrity is a bugger, it really is. Lying can get you into difficulties, but to really wind up in the crappers try telling nothing but the truth.

David Mitchell

#87. When you are scanning for lies and you can't decide if a person is telling the truth or lying, it's in your best interests to always go with your gut feeling.

Brian Night

#88. It's easier to tell a lie, than to tell the truth. It's easier to kill a fly, than it is to turn it loose.

George Harrison

#89. Never be afraid to raise your voice for honesty and truth and compassion against injustice and lying and greed. If people all over the world ... would do this, it would change the earth.

William Faulkner

#90. When both parties are lying and they both know the other party's lying, it comes powerful close to being the same thing as telling the truth.

Orson Scott Card

#91. Tell the truth, lies are difficult to remember.

William Cranch Bond

#92. I deny the lawfulness of telling a lie to a sick man for fear of alarming him; you have no business with consequences, you are to tell the truth.

Samuel Johnson

#93. You can't build a future if you do not know who you are. You can't become who you are meant to be if you can't tell the truth about who you are, what you have, and everything about your life. The truth is the absolute essence to your success, while lies are the absolute essence to your failures.

Suze Orman

#94. Telling a lie is called wrong. Telling the truth is called right. Except when telling the truth is called bad manners and telling a lie is called polite.

Judith Viorst

#95. If there was twenty ways of telling the truth and only one way of telling a lie, the Government would find it out. It's in the nature of governments to tell lies.

George Bernard Shaw

#96. A liar is not believed even though he tell the truth.

Marcus Tullius Cicero

#97. Like one
Who having into truth, by telling of it,
Made such a sinner of his memory,
To credit his own lie.

William Shakespeare