Hey!, Wanna See Some Sin?
"Cry aloud, spare not, lift up your voice like a trumpet and show my people their transgressions and . . . their sins." Isa. 58:1
22. Lies: Index
"You want the truth. You can't handle the truth!", (from the film, "A Few Good Men")
"If you continue in my word, then you are my disciples . . . And you shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free." (John 8:32)
0. Lies: Index
"There is one way to find out if a man is honest--ask him. If he says yes, you know he is crooked." --Groucho Marx
2. How often do we lie to others?
"If you do not wish to be lied to, do not ask questions. If there were no questions, there would be no lies." --B. Traven
"Life is a system of half-truths and lies, of opportunistic, convenient evasion." --Langston Hughes
3. Who lies to whom?
Part 1: Media and Politicians"How can you tell if a politician is lying? His lips are moving." --unknown
Part 2: Everyone else"They say" is often a great liar. --Proverb
"Fear is not in the habit of speaking truth. When perfect sincerity is expected, perfect freedom must be allowed; nor has anyone who is apt to be angry when he hears the truth, any cause to wonder that he does not hear it." -Tacitus
"Falsehood is invariably the child of fear in one form or another." --Aleister Crowley
"The object is not truth but persuasion." --Thomas Macaulay
5. Different types of Lies.
Part 1: What is a Lie?"A lie always needs a truth for a handle to it." --Henry Ward Beecher
Part 2: Different types of Lies"If you wish to strengthen a lie, mix a little truth in with it." --Zohar
Part 3: Different types of Liars
"A train of thought is never false. The falsehood lies deep in the necessities of existence, in secret fears and half-formed ambitions, in the secret confidence combined with a secret mistrust of ourselves, in the love of hope and the dread of uncertain days." --Joseph Conrad
"You don't tell deliberate lies, but sometimes you have to be evasive." --Margaret Thatcher.
"That's not a lie, it's a terminological inexactitude. Also, a tactical misrepresentation." -- Alexander Haig
"How many legs does a dog have if you call the tail a leg? Four. Calling a tail a leg doesn't make it a leg." - Abraham Lincoln.
7. A holiday celebrating liars and lying.
"The first of April is the day we remember what we are the other 364 days of the year."
--Mark Twain (Samuel Langhorne Clemens).
8. The most common lies."If a lie is repeated often enough all the dumb jackasses in the world not only get to believe it, they even swear by it." --Billy Boy Franklin
"Repetition does not transform a lie into a truth." --Franklin Roosevelt
Part 2: The Biggest lies.
"The great masses of the people . . . will more easily fall victims to a big lie than to a small one." --Adolph Hitler
"You shall know the truth and the Truth shall make you mad." . . . Aldous Huxley.
"A lie is an abomination unto the Lord, and a very present help in trouble." --Adlai Stevenson
10. Contradictions and hypocrisy about lying. We do it to others but resent having it done to us.
"Please don’t lie to me, unless you’re absolutely sure I’ll never find out the truth." . . . Ashleigh Brilliant
11. Teaching our children to lie.
"Never teach your child to be cunning or you may be certain you will be one of the very first victims of his shrewdness." --Josh Billings
12. "Religions" teach us to lie.
"Every one wishes to have truth on his side, but it is not every one that sincerely wishes to be on the side of truth." --Whately.
13. Society teaches us to lie.
"As scarce as truth is, the supply has always been in excess of the demand." --Josh Billings.
"The men the American people admire most extravagantly are the most daring liars; the men they detest most violently are those who try to tell them the truth." --H.L. Mencken
14. Lying to ourselves
Part 1: We lie to ourselves and sometimes, we want others to lie to us.
"It takes two to speak truth - One to speak, and another to hear." --Henry David Thoreau.
"Nothing is easier than self-deceit. For what each man wishes, that he also believes to be true." --Demosthenes
"All lies and jests, still a man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest." --Paul Simon
Part 2: The lying disease"I do myself a greater injury in lying than I do him of whom I tell a lie." --Montaigne
Part 3: Artistic works of fiction. Why we want to hear lies.
Books, movies and TV: Why we love lies.
"Humankind cannot bear very much reality." --T.S. Eliot
"Why shouldn’t truth be stranger than fiction? Fiction, after all, has to make sense." --Mark Twain
"He who permits himself to tell a lie once, finds it much easier to do it a second and third time, till at length it becomes habitual; he tells lies without attending to it, and truth without the world's believing him. This falsehood of the tongue leads to that of the heart, and in time depraves all its good dispositions." --Thomas Jefferson
"Lying is like alcoholism. You are always recovering." -- Steven Soderbergh
"Lying is a hateful and accursed vice. We have no other tie upon one another, but our word. If we did but discover the horror and consequence of it, we should pursue it with fire and sword, and more justly than other crimes."--Montaigne
16. Does God lie? Does the Bible show lying to be acceptable?
Part 1 "I have not written unto you because you know not the truth, but because you know it, and that no lie is of the truth." (1 John 2:21).
Part 2 "Lie not one to another, seeing that you have put off the old man with his deeds [your former way of life]; And have put on the new man, which is renewed in knowledge after the image of him that created him:" (Col. 3:9-10).
17. The effects of lying to loved ones, to friends, to society, and to ourselves."The important thing is to stop lying to yourself. A man who lies to himself, and believes his own lies, becomes unable to recognize truth, either in himself or in anyone else, and he ends up losing respect for himself as well as for others. When he has no respect for anyone, he can no longer love and, in order to divert himself, having no love in him he yields to his impulses, indulges in the lowest forms of pleasure, and behaves in the end like an animal, in satisfying his vices. And it all comes from lying- lying to others and to yourself." --Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov.
"You know what it's like when you find out a friend is a liar? Whatever he says, after that, sounds false, however true it may be." --Jean Giraudoux
"A single lie destroys a whole reputation for integrity. "--Baltasar Gracian
"True friendship can afford true knowledge. It does not depend on darkness and ignorance." - Henry David Thoreau.
"Live truth instead of professing it." - Elbert Hubbard.
"The greatest homage we can pay to truth, is to use it."--James Russell Lowell.
21. For further reading: Essays and Opinion Articles on Lying
"Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored." - Aldous Huxley.
22. The Lying Test: Am I a Liar?
"If you tell the truth, you don't have to remember anything." - Mark Twain.
Space photos: reality or Photoshop?