Quotes & Sayings About Mendacity

...true style comes from innate cunning and mendacity. You can't buy it. — Terry Pratchett

Those of us forced to read the London papers sometimes speculate about which is greater: the average British hack's sloth, mendacity, ignorance, obsequiousness, capacity for drink, or aversion to paying for that drink. Smart money tends to split between the latter two. — Larry King

The bungling, the mendacity and the cynicism of the men responsible both for the disaster and the attempt to cover it up could not be dismissed as a regrettable perversion of Soviet values: they were Soviet values, as the Soviet leader began to appreciate. — Tony Judt

For most people, honesty is such an unusual departure from their standard modus operandi - such an abherration in their workaday mendacity - that they feel obliged to alert you when a moment of sincerity is coming on. — Zoe Heller

As a writer, my mission is to represent the perceptible world in such a way that readers can see the extraordinary that lives all around them. I want to converse on the page. I want to squash the humdrum, the mendacity that arrives due to too many overworked routines and overfed expectations. I want to entertain and awaken. I want to imagine and observe. I want to spin my fiction from an honest, curious place. — Jen Knox

One of those divine fools born to merge memory and mendacity into dreams as airily gorgeous as cobwebs strung with drops of dew. — Stephen King

WEATHER, n. The climate of an hour. A permanent topic of conversation among persons whom it does not interest, but who have inherited the tendency to chatter about it from naked arboreal ancestors whom it keenly concerned. The setting up of official weather bureaus and their maintenance in mendacity prove that even governments are accessible to suasion by the rude forefathers of the jungle. — Ambrose Bierce

And the German society of eighty million people had been shielded against reality and factuality by exactly the same means, the same self-deception, lies, and stupidity that had now become engrained in Eichmann's mentality. These lies changed from year to year, and they frequently contradicted each other; moreover, they were not necessarily the same for the various branches of the Party hierarchy or the people at large. But the practice of self-deception had become so common, almost a moral prerequisite for survival, that even now, eighteen years after the collapse of the Nazi regime, when most of the specific content of its lies has been forgotten, it is sometimes difficult not to believe that mendacity has become an integral part of the German national character. — Hannah Arendt

Age cannot limit him, nor use exhaust his infinite mendacity. — Joseph Furphy

The playwright Henrik Ibsen used the phrase "pillars of society" to refer to those people in positions of power who profit from the mendacity of the society they live in. I hope that those people who have recognized their own story and freed themselves from the lies of conventional morality will be the pillars of a future society built on conscious awareness. Without the awareness of what happened to us at the outset of our lives, the entire fabric of our culture seems to me to be nothing other than a farce. — Alice Miller

Social and political life is a Society for the Diffusion of Mendacity . — Samuel Laman Blanchard

He spoke in the hoarse, cadenced tones of a lifelong teller of tales - one of those divine fools born to merge memory and mendacity into dreams as airily gorgeous as cobwebs string with drops of dew. — Stephen King

Man, in spite of his tendency towards mendacity, has a great respect for what he calls the truth. Truth is his staff in his voyage through life; commonplaces are the bread in his bag and the wine in his jug. — Remy De Gourmont

The liar is no whit better than the thief, and if his mendacity takes the form of slander he may be worse than most thieves. It puts a premium upon knavery untruthfully to attack an honest man, or even with hysterical exaggeration to assail a bad man with untruth. — Theodore Roosevelt

The poor must be wisely visited and liberally cared for, so that mendicity shall not be tempted into mendacity, nor want exasperated into crime. — Robert Charles Winthrop

Her clear conscience mocked rumour's mendacity, But we are a mob prone to credit sin. — Ovid

Washington's Corruption and Mendacity Is What Makes America 'Exceptional' — Paul Craig Roberts

If it doesn't have ambiguity, don't bother to take it. I love that, that aspect of photography - the mendacity of photography - it's got to have some kind of peculiarity in it or it's not interesting to me. — Sally Mann

I do not plan in any way to whitewash my sin. I do not call it a mistake, a mendacity; I call it sin. I would much rather, if possible - and in my estimation it would not be possible - to make it worse than less than it actually is. I have no one but myself to blame. I do not lay the fault or the blame of the charge at anyone else's feet. For no one is to blame but I take the responsibility. I take the blame. I take the fault. — Jimmy Swaggart

I looked at Mum and realized
twang!
that she was telling an untruth. A big untruth. And I remember thinking in that instant how thrilling and grown-up it must be to say something so completely untrue, as opposed to the little amateur fibs I was already practiced at
horrid little apprentice sinner that I was
like the ones about you'd already said your prayers or washed under the fingernails. Yes, I was impressed. I too must learn to say these gorgeous untruths. Imaginary kings and queens would be my houseguests when I was older. — Christopher Buckley

When different identity states convey contradictory information and then have amnesia for what the other identity states said, the patient may be thought to be lying. This can appear to be characterological mendacity when it is not. — Elizabeth F. Howell

Laine slowly rolled out of bed. The queen size was one of the few new things in the house. But now, even the new bed felt tainted. It was an inner-spring monument to lies, a petri dish of mendacity she had shared with her faithless husband, and shared now with creeping dreams that flew from the light but left harsh scratches and diseased black feathers. Laine promised herself that, as soon as, she could, she would rid herself of this house, this bed, her clothes, her jewelry - everything but the flesh she lived in. She would scrub herself clean and flee to start a new life whose first and only commandment would be: Never let thyself be lied to again. — Stephen M. Irwin

Since I no longer expect anything from mankind except madness, meanness, and mendacity; egotism, cowardice, and self-delusion, I have stopped being a misanthrope. — Irving Layton

Among all the world's races, some obscure Bedouin tribes possibly apart, Americans are the most prone to misinformation. This is not the consequence of any special preference for mendacity, although at the higher levels of their public administration that tendency is impressive. It is rather that so much of what they themselves believe is wrong. — John Kenneth Galbraith

Game Over! In this country, we outnumber them by the hundreds of millions, yet in the end, they'll win. They've already won. Over decades, with the appetite of the greedy and the cunning of the wicked, their hired agents have built up a national archetype that's now unstoppable. While we were distracted by our own shadows, their needles pierced the national psyche, slow dripping the poison of mendacity into our nation's bloodstream. They contaminated the law with toxic corruption, and while invoking the name of freedom, they crushed any opposition with bone-cracking efficiency. When we finally peel away the submissive bandages that wrapped our imaginary wounds and promised us safety, we'll find our flesh gone to dust, leaving only a willowy skeleton of hopelessness and surrender. — Anonymous

Outrageous fiscal mendacity is neither historically normal nor bipartisan. It's a modern Republican thing. — Paul Krugman

We all have a stake in the truth. Society functions based on an assumption that people will abide by their word - that truth prevails over mendacity. For the most part, it does. If it didn't, relationships would have a short shelf life, commerce would cease, and trust between parents and children would be destroyed. All of us depend on honesty, because when truth is lacking we suffer, and society suffers. When Adolf Hitler lied to Neville Chamberlain, there was not peace in our time, and over fifty million people paid the price with their lives. When Richard Nixon lied to the nation, it destroyed the respect many had for the office of the president. When Enron executives lied to their employees, thousands of lives were ruined overnight. We count on our government and commercial institutions to be honest and truthful. We need and expect our friends and family to be truthful. Truth is essential for all relations be they personal, professional, or civic. — Joe Navarro

What happens if fully rational politicians compete for the support of irrational voters - specifically, voters with irrational beliefs about the effects of various policies? It is a recipe for mendacity. — Bryan Caplan

What's that smell in this room? Didn't you notice it, Brick? Didn't you notice a powerful and obnoxious odor of mendacity in this room? There ain't nothin' more powerful than the odor of mendacity. You can smell it. It smells like death.

- Big Daddy — Tennessee Williams

For all his ego and mendacity, Moore is immensely popular. He's got an Oscar, more film awards than we can easily count, and a following whose blindest followers resemble cult members. Like a cult, the Moore movement shares the drive to recruit converts.... — David T. Hardy

While watching the current state of America, I have concluded we should welcome the truth no matter how it arrives and justice no matter who or what it affects. When we don't, we become a vessel of mendacity and hypocrisy. — Bobby F. Kimbrough Jr.

Upstairs, it's 18th century England, where farming out the poor meant lumping the blind, crippled, insane, epileptic, deaf and dumb in almshouses with criminals because The History of the Poor Laws was designed to discourage mendacity, wherein anyone giving alms to beggars was put in jail . . ." In other words, little has changed - many still believed there's no distinction between tolerating the suffering of others and causing it. — Philip Schultz

Dealing with a government with whom mendacity is a science is an extremely difficult matter. — John Hay

We love old travelers: we love to hear them prate, drivel and lie; we love them for their asinine vanity, their ability to bore, their luxuriant fertility of imagination, their startling, brilliant, overwhelming mendacity. — Mark Twain

Almost as remarkable as the hoax itself, and indicative of the enormous cultural power of its perpetrators, is the fact that the revelation of Rigoberta's mendacity has changed almost nothing. The Nobel committee has already refused to take back her prize, many of the thousands of college courses that make her book a required text for American college students will continue to do so, and the editorial writers of the major press institutions have already defended her falsehoods on the same grounds that supporters of Tawana Brawley's parallel hoax made famous: even if she's lying, she's telling the truth. — David Horowitz

Deception, machination and mendacity lie at the core of human intelligence, like worms coiled at the core of a apple — Mark Rowlands

Sometimes he hoped that she would die, painlessly, in some accident, she who was out of doors in the streets, crossing busy thoroughfares, from morning to night. And as she always returned safe and sound, he marvelled at the strength, at the suppleness of the human body, which was able continually to hold in check, to outwit all the perils that environed it (which to Swann seemed innumerable, since his own secret desire had strewn them in her path), and so allowed its occupant, the soul, to abandon itself, day after day, and almost with impunity, to its career of mendacity, to the pursuit of pleasure. — Marcel Proust

Psychiatric expert testimony: mendacity masquerading as medicine. — Thomas Szasz

America ... is being lost through television. Because in advertising, mendacity and manipulation are raised to the level of internal values for the advertisers. Interruption is seen as a necessary concomitant to marketing. It used to be that a seven- or eight-year old could read consecutively for an hour or two. But they don't do that much anymore. The habit has been lost. Every seven to ten minutes, a child is interrupted by a commercial on TV> Kids get used to the idea that their interest is there to be broken into. In consequence, they are no longer able to study as well. Their powers of concentration have been reduced by systematic interruption. — Norman Mailer

We live surrounded by a systematic appeal to a dream world which all mature, scientific reality would reject. We, quite literally, advertise our commitment to immaturity, mendacity and profound gullibility. It is as the hallmark of the culture. And it is justified as being economically indispensable. — John Kenneth Galbraith

I do not scruple to employ mendacity and a fictitious appearance of female incompetence when the occasion demands it. — Elizabeth Peters

mendacity." He then introduced his son to the President, — David McCullough

Instead of safeguarding truth and honesty, the state then tends to become a major source of insincerity and mendacity. — Hans F. Sennholz

Mendacity is a system that we live in," declares Brick. "Liquor is one way out an'death's the other. — Tennessee Williams

My child, you have a flawed grasp of the nature of myth-making. I am a poet and storyteller, a creator of ballads and sagas. Pray do not confuse the exercise of the imagination with mere mendacity. I am a master of the mysteries of words, their meanings and music and mellifluous magic. — Frances Hardinge

The clock ticks; the taunting rhythm serving as a reminder that forward is the only way we can go. The mechanical heartbeat of the darkness, a cold ellipsis, punctuating years gone by.
Arising unchained.
No glorious hymn, just the steady beat of the illusion of time. We heal or we carry forward the weight of our wounds ... To believe otherwise is the mendacity of desperation.
Arising honestly.
The miles behind are littered with the weight of nostalgia, but too many miles lay ahead us to carry the weight. In the end, even echoes fade away.
Pen in hand ...
Arising to write the next chapter.
(MU Articles 2013, Dedication to Joey) — Shannon L. Alder

But newspapers have a duty to truth,' Van said.
Lev clucked his tongue. 'They tell the truth only as the exception. Zola wrote that the mendacity of the press could be divided into two groups: the yellow press lies every day without hesitating. But others, like the Times, speak the truth on all inconsequential occasions, so they can deceive the public with the requisite authority when it becomes necessary.'
Van got up from his chair to gather the cast-off newspapers. Lev took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. 'I don't mean to offend the journalists; they aren't any different from other people. They're merely the megaphones of the other people. — Barbara Kingsolver

As flawed as Southern culture is, mendacity has always been treated in the South as a despicable characteristic. Notice how often Southerners casually address others as "you son of a bitch" with no insult intended. When the same person calls someone a "lying son of a bitch," you know he's serious. — James Lee Burke

One of the chief obstacles to intelligence is credulity, and credulity could be enormously diminished by instruction in the prevalent forms of mendacity. — Bertrand Russell