Most Common Lies Quotes & Sayings

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

We can trace the communitarian fantasy that lies at the root of all humanism back to the model of a literary society, in which participation through reading the canon reveals a common love of inspiring messages. At the heart of humanism so understood we discover a cult or club fantasy: the dream of the portentous solidarity of those who have been chosen to be allowed to read. In the ancient world - indeed, until the dawn of the modern nation-states - the power of reading actually did mean something like membership of a secret elite; linguistic knowledge once counted in many places as the provenance of sorcery. In Middle English the word 'glamour' developed out of the word 'grammar'. The person who could read would be thought easily capable of other impossibilities. — Peter Sloterdijk

If the world gives you the blues, if you wake up in the middle of the night with waves of fear and senseless panic washing over you, I am your friend. If you're overcome by a desperation that makes your mouth open for a scream that never comes out but just freezes your face in mute despair, then you and I have something in common. If you can't understand them for the life of you, even though you've tried so hard, when that dislocation makes you feel like you're the only one of your species on the planet, I know I can confide in you. If this endless ghetto of lies and heart break, this life-long run of fences and flickering neon signs, night sweats and suicidal urges makes you feel like stopping, just stopping, like stopping breathing, wait. Wait. You don't have to tell me your name. You don't have to prove yourself to me. I accept you. If you're finding life to be the one thing that's trying to kill you, I want you to stay alive to rise with the sun and fight back. — Henry Rollins

Universally accepted, microevolution has limits for what it can explain. These limits do not reach the center where the controversy lies - the Thesis of Common Ancestry was popularized by Charles Darwin. Darwin believed that the world we see today has come to us through an evolutionary process called natural selection. Through genetic mutation, species adapt and develop because the strongest of a species will survive and pass on their DNA to their successors. Macroevolution is the belief that all development - from the first moments of the universe, the formation of stars and planets, to the eventual emergence of simple bacteria, to the most complex human being is explainable through this naturalistic transformational process. — Jon Morrison

The most common sort of lie is that by which a man deceives himself: the deception of others is a relatively rare offense. — Friedrich Nietzsche

The most common lie is that which one lies to himself; lying to others is relatively an exception. — Friedrich Nietzsche

In a world of full of manipulation, half-truths and lies, the conspiracy theory is often a safer bet than the official story. — Gary Hopkins

This is not to say that power and security are the sole or even the most important objectives of mankind; as a species we prize beauty, truth, and goodness. . . . What the realist seeks to stress is that all these more noble goals will be lost unless one makes provision for one's security in the power struggle among social groups. . . . A moral commitment lies at the heart of realism. . . . What Morgenthau and many other realists have in common is a belief that ethical and political behavior will fail unless it takes into account the actual practice of states and the teachings of sound theory. — Robert Gilpin

The chief if not the sole cause of the enslavement of the Indian peoples by the English lies in this very absence of a religious consciousness and of the guidance for conduct which should flow from it - a lack common in our day to all nations East and West, from Japan to England and America alike. — Leo Tolstoy

The whole point of meditation is not to follow the path laid down by thought to what it considers to be truth, enlightenment or reality. There is no path to truth. The following of any path leads to what thought has already formulated and, however pleasant or satisfying, it is not truth. It is a fallacy to think that a system of meditation, the constant practising of that system in daily life for a few given moments, or the repetition of it during the day, will bring about clarity or understanding. Meditation lies beyond all this and, like love, cannot be cultivated by thought. As long as the thinker exists to meditate, meditation is merely a part of that self-isolation which is the common movement of one's everyday life. — Jiddu Krishnamurti

The most common human act that writing a novel resembles is lying. The working novelist lies daily, very complexly and at great length. If not for our excessive vanity and our over-active imaginations, novelists might be unusually difficult to deceive. — William Gibson

The most common lie you will ever tell God is your opportunity to do the right thing was taken from you. — Shannon L. Alder

The stuff of which the world of our experience is composed is, in my belief, neither mind nor matter, but something more primitive than either. Both mind and matter seem to be composite, and the stuff of which they are compounded lies in a sense between the two, in a sense above them both, like a common ancestor. — Bertrand Russell

The most unfathomable schools and sages have never attained to the
gravity which dwells in the eyes of a baby of three months old. It is
the gravity of astonishment at the universe, and astonishment at the
universe is not mysticism, but a transcendent common-sense. The
fascination of children lies in this: that with each of them all things
are remade, and the universe is put again upon its trial. — Gilbert K. Chesterton

The act of writing bears something in common with the act of love. The writer, at his most productive moments, just flows. He gives of that which is uniquely himself. He makes himself naked, recording his nakedness in the written word. Herein lies some of the terror which frequently freezes a writer, preventing him from producing. Herein, too, lies some of the courage that must be entailed in letting others learn how one has experienced or is experiencing the world. — Sidney Jourard

A partial truth is the most common path to an entire lie. — Fred Munoz

Let's zoom in on a particular form of synesthesia as an example. For most of us, February and Wednesday do not have any particular place in space. But some synesthetes experience precise locations in relation to their bodies for numbers, time units, and other concepts involving sequence or ordinality. They can point to the spot where the number 32 is, where December floats, or where the year 1966 lies.8 These objectified three-dimensional sequences are commonly called number forms, although more precisely the phenomenon is called spatial sequence synesthesia.9 The most common types of spatial sequence synesthesia involve days of the week, months of the year, the counting integers, or years grouped by decade. In addition to these common types, researchers have encountered spatial configurations for shoe and clothing sizes, baseball statistics, historical eras, salaries, TV channels, temperature, and more. — David Eagleman

The most intense skeptics and the most intense believers of our age share a common conviction: that beneath all superficial appearances lies a deeper truth. — Mark Juergensmeyer

When writing these tests it's obvious and clear where "duplication" lies and how "common" pieces can be pulled into helper methods. Unfortunately, each time we extract a method we risk complicating our tiny universes. The right abstractions can reduce complexity; however, it's often unclear which abstraction within a test will provide the most value to the team. — Anonymous

Independent and stubborn natures, such as are particularly common among men of learning, do not readily bow to another's will and for the most part only accept his leadership grudgingly. But when Lorentz is in the presidential chair, an atmosphere of happy cooperation is invariably created, however much those present may differ in their aims and habits of thought. The secret of this success lies not only in his swift comprehension of people and things and his marvelous command of language, but above all in this, that one feels that his whole heart is in the business at hand, and that when he is at work, he has room for nothing else in his mind. Nothing disarms the recalcitrant so much as this. — Albert Einstein

Do not shun this maxim because it is common-place. On the contrary, take the closest heed of what observant men, who would probably like to show originality, are yet constrained to repeat. Therein lies the marrow of the wisdom of the world. — Arthur Helps

Hanging may seem barbarous, but the greater barbarity lies in the slow abandonment of our common law traditions. — Michael Gove