Why We Lie Quotes

“Speech was given to man to disguise his thoughts. —Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand”
― David Livingstone Smith, Why We Lie: The Evolutionary Roots of Deception and the Unconscious Mind

“The universe is made of stories, not atoms.”
― David Livingstone Smith, Why We Lie: The Evolutionary Roots of Deception and the Unconscious Mind

“Note that having a large brain is biologically costly: the brain is an expensive organ to run, and large ones consume many precious calories (the human brain accounts for a whopping 20 percent of our energy expenditure).”
― David Livingstone Smith, Why We Lie: The Evolutionary Roots of Deception and the Unconscious Mind

“If people with good reputations are a resource for whom others compete, this leads to all the dirty tricks that people use against one another when they are competing for something of value. One such move is to “poison the well,” to destroy the perceived value of the resource. When the resource is a person’s reputation, some individuals will spread malicious gossip to destroy or damage it (Roland Barthes described this as “murder by language”).”
― David Livingstone Smith, Why We Lie: The Evolutionary Roots of Deception and the Unconscious Mind

“Slavery is as old as civilization, and has been practiced all over the world. It was ubiquitous in antiquity, and is taken for granted in both the Old and New Testaments of the Bible (you may recall that Paul enjoined slaves to obey their masters “in fear and trembling” as they would Christ),”
― David Livingstone Smith, Why We Lie: The Evolutionary Roots of Deception and the Unconscious Mind