Social and political life is a Society for the Diffusion of Mendacity. - Samuel Laman Blanchard

It is an odd mode of diminishing one's own weakness to ask a friend to lend us the equal force of his.

As with the tender juvenile, who sets light to his frock, so with the sweet senior, who sets his fortunes on fire. Even in his maturer time, in his state of cinderhood, he still craves to be further consumed.

When a story has gone the grand circuit, and travels back to us uncontradicted, we may reasonably begin to relax in our belief of it. If nobody questions it, it is manifestly a fiction; if it passes current, it is almost sure to be a counterfeit. The course of truth never yet ran smooth.