Lying

by Sam Harris

We often behave in ways that are guaranteed to make us unhappy.

Lying is the royal road to chaos.

lying, even about the smallest matters, needlessly damages personal relationships and public trust.

endless forms of suffering and embarrassment could be easily avoided by simply telling the truth.

Deception can take many forms, but not all acts of deception are lies.

The boundary between lying and deception is often vague. It is even possible to deceive with the truth.

To lie is to intentionally mislead others when they expect honest communication.

People lie so that others will form beliefs that are not true. The more consequential the beliefs—that is, the more a person’s well-being demands a correct understanding of the world or of other people’s opinions—the more consequential the lie.

To speak truthfully is to accurately represent one’s beliefs. But candor offers no assurance that one’s beliefs about the world are true.

it is in believing one thing while intending to communicate another that every lie is born.

The liar often imagines that he does no harm so long as his lies go undetected.

The moment we consider our dishonesty from the perspective of those we lie to, we recognize that we would feel betrayed if the roles were reversed.

Few of us are murderers or thieves, but we have all been liars.

Honest people are a refuge: You know they mean what they say; you know they will not say one thing to your face and another behind your back;

Honesty is a gift we can give to others. It is also a source of power and an engine of simplicity. Knowing that we will attempt to tell the truth, whatever the circumstances, leaves us with little to prepare for. Knowing that we told the truth in the past leaves us with nothing to keep track of. We can simply be ourselves in every moment.

You can be honest and kind, because your purpose in telling the truth is not to offend people. You simply want them to have the information you have and would want to have if you were in their shoes.

Ethical transgressions are generally divided into two categories: the bad things we do (acts of commission) and the good things we fail to do (acts of omission).

to lie is to infringe on the freedom of those we care about.

In many circumstances in life, false encouragement can be very costly to another person.

False encouragement is a kind of theft: It steals time, energy, and motivation that a person could put toward some other purpose.

In lying to them, you are not only declining to help them—you are denying them useful information and setting them up for future disappointment.

When we presume to lie for the benefit of others, we have decided that we are the best judges of how much they should understand about their own lives—about how they appear, their reputations, or their prospects in the world.

When we pretend not to know the truth, we must also pretend not to be motivated by it.

when asked for an honest opinion, we do our friends no favors by pretending not to notice flaws in their work, especially when those who are not their friends are bound to notice the same flaws.

if we have a history of being honest, our praise and encouragement will actually mean something.

To agree to keep a secret is to assume a burden.

the many corrosive effects of unjust laws: They tempt peaceful and (otherwise) honest people to lie so as to avoid being punished for behavior that is ethically blameless.

One of the greatest problems for the liar is that he must keep track of his lies.

When you tell the truth, you have nothing to keep track of.

What does it mean to have integrity? Integrity consists of many things, but it generally requires us to avoid behavior that readily leads to shame or remorse.

To lie is to erect a boundary between the truth we are living and the perception others have of us.

Vulnerability comes in pretending to be someone you are not.

Lying is, almost by definition, a refusal to cooperate with others. It condenses a lack of trust and trustworthiness into a single act. It is both a failure of understanding and an unwillingness to be understood. To lie is to recoil from relationship.

Lies are the social equivalent of toxic waste: Everyone is potentially harmed by their spread.