"If you tell the truth, you don't have to remember anything."
— Mark Twain

"The reason I talk to myself is because I’m the only one whose answers I accept."
— George Carlin

"I'm not upset that you lied to me, I'm upset that from now on I can't believe you."
— Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

" I lie to myself all the time, but I never believe me."
— S.E. Hinton (The Outsiders)

"Marge, it takes two to lie- one to lie, and one to listen. (Homer Simpson)"
— Matt Groening

"A truth that's told with bad intent
Beats all the lies you can invent."
— William Blake

"It is amazing how complete is the delusion that beauty is goodness."
— Leo Tolstoy

"Clinton lied. A man might forget where he parks or where he lives, but he never forgets oral sex, no matter how bad it is."
— Barbara Bush

"Knowing can be a curse on a person's life. I'd traded in a pack of lies for a pack of truth, and I didn't know which one was heavier. Which one took the most strength to carry around? It was a ridiculous question, though, because once you know the truth, you can't ever go back and pick up your suitcase of lies. Heavier or not, the truth is yours now."
— Sue Monk Kidd (The Secret Life of Bees)

"Half of writing history is hiding the truth"
— Joss Whedon

"'I told him I was going to betray you, and betray Lyra, and he believed me because I was corrupt and full of wickedness; he looked so deep I felt sure he'd see the truth. But I lied too well. I was lying with every nerve and fiber and everything I'd ever done...I wanted him to find no good in me, and he didn't. There is none.'"
— Philip Pullman (The Amber Spyglass)

"The truth is always an insult or a joke, lies are generally tastier. We love them. The nature of lies is to please. Truth has no concern for anyones comfort" - Arturo Binewski."
— Katherine Dunn

"...it (feminism) is mixed up with a muddled idea that women are free when they serve their employers but slaves when they help their husbands."
— G.K. Chesterton

"I always tell the truth. Even when I lie."
— Al Pacino

"History is a set of lies agreed upon."
— Napoleon Bonaparte

"Life's wildest moment---she kneels on the sidewalk. Everything else she does is lies, lies."
— Henry Miller (Sexus)

"The visionary lies to himself, the liar only to others."
— Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

"We all know that Art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realize truth at least the truth that is given us to understand. The artist must know the manner whereby to convince others of the truthfulness of his lies."
— Pablo Picasso

"Anger at lies lasts forever. Anger at truth can't last."
— Greg Evans

"Anything is better than lies and deceit! "
— Leo Tolstoy (Anna Karenina)

"Writing fiction is the act of weaving a series of lies to arrive at a greater truth."
— Khalid Hosseini

"A lie, sometimes, can be truer than the truth, which is why fiction gets written."
— Tim O'Brien

"We lie the loudest when we lie to ourselves."
— Eric Hoffer

"I guess he believes if a lie is big enough and repeated often enough, it will be believed.
"
— John McCain

"For Sabina, living in truth, lying neither to ourselves nor to others, was possible only away from the public: the moment someone keeps an eye on what we do, we involuntarily make allowances for that eye, and nothing we do is truthful. Having a public, keeping a public in mind, means living in lies."
— Milan Kundera (The Unbearable Lightness of Being)

"Anyway, why would you trust anything written down? She certainly didn't trust "Mothers of Borogravia!" and that was from the government. And if you couldn't trust the government, who could you trust?
Very nearly everyone, come to think of it..."
— Terry Pratchett (Monstrous Regiment)

"I have heard so many lies and I've seen those empty smiles, knowing that somewhere else I could see the smile that means something."
— To/Die/For

"Falsehood is so easy, truth so difficult....Examine your words well, and you will find that even when you have no motive to be false, it is a very hard thing to say the exact truth, even about your own immediate feelings- much harder than to say something fine about them which is not the exact truth."
— George Eliot (Adam Bede)

"Despite the variety and the differences, and however much we proclaim the contrary, what the media produce is neither spontaneous nor completely “free:” “news” does not just happen, pictures and ideas do not merely spring from reality into our eyes and minds, truth is not directly available, we do not have unrestrained variety at our disposal.

For like all modes of communication, television, radio, and newspapers observe certain rules and conventions to get things across intelligibly, and it is these, often more than the reality being conveyed, that shape the material delivered by the media. "
— Edward W. Said

"There can be no liberty for a community which lacks the means by which to detect lies."
— Walter Lippmann

"Her words were like tinfoil; they shone and they covered things up."
— Helen Cross (My Summer of Love)

"When one fib becomes due as it were, you must forge another to take up the old acceptance; and so the stock of your lies in circulation inevitably multiplies, and the danger of detection increases every day."
— William Makepeace Thackeray (Vanity Fair)

"Lying is a thriving vocation."
— Susanna Centrilivre

"The young gentlemen who came calling seemed especially puzzling. They sat in their velvet shirts and their leather boots, nibbling burnt cakes and praising Diamond's mind, and all the while their eyes said other things. Now, their eyes said. Now. Then: Patience, patience. 'You are flowers,' their mouths said, 'You are jewels, you are golden dreams.' Their eyes said: I eat flowers, I burn with dreams, I have a tower without a door in my heart, and I will keep you there... "
— Patricia A. McKillip (Harrowing the Dragon)

"Sometimes what I wouldn't give to have us sitting in a bar again at 9:00 a.m. telling lies to one another, far from God."
— Denis Johnson (Jesus' Son)

"Truth is a naked and open daylight, that does not show the masques, and mummeries, and triumphs of the world, half so stately and daintily as candle-lights. . . A mixture of a lie doth ever add pleasure"
— Francis Bacon

"I have squandered my resistance
For a pocketful of mumbles
Such are promises
All lies and jests
Still a man hears what he wants to hear
And disregards the rest.

(The Boxer)
"
— Paul Simon

"Truth is confirmed by inspection and delay; falsehood by haste and uncertainty."
— Tacitus (55-117 A.D.) Roman Historian

"For an instant she hesitated. Baldanders said, 'You may trust him. The doctor has his own way of looking at the world, but he lies less than people believe.'"
— Gene Wolfe (Shadow & Claw)

"Truth has to be credible or it makes as much trouble as any lie!"
— Sidney Howard

"lies, truth, loveI have always loved truth so passionately that I have often resorted to lying as a way of introducing it into the minds which were ignorant of it's charms."
— Giacomo Casanova