lies could spawn more lies, each offspring bigger than its parent.

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

By repetition, each lie becomes an irreversible fact upon which other lies are constructed.

One unscrupulous distortion of the truth tends to beget other and opposite distortions.

Lies are never forgotten, they go on and they grow.

The repeated lies become history, but they don't necessarily become the truth.

The more a lie contains truth, the more it is evil.

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 truths without the world's believing him. This falsehood of tongue leads to that of the heart, and in time depraves all its good dispositions.

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.

I was not the one to invent lies: they were created in a society divided by class and each of us inherited lies when we were born. It is not by refusing to lie that we will abolish lies: it is by eradicating class by any means necessary.

Lies propagate, that’s what I’m saying. You’ve got to tell more lies to cover them up, lie about every fact that’s connected to the first lie. And if you kept on lying, and you kept on trying to cover it up, sooner or later you’d even have to start lying about the general laws of thought. Like, someone is selling you some kind of alternative medicine that doesn’t work, and any double-blind experimental study will confirm that it doesn’t work. So if someone wants to go on defending the lie, they’ve got to get you to disbelieve in the experimental method. Like, the experimental method is just for merely scientific kinds of medicine, not amazing alternative medicine like theirs. Or a good and virtuous person should believe as strongly as they can, no matter what the evidence says. Or truth doesn’t exist and there’s no such thing as objective reality. A lot of common wisdom like that isn’t just mistaken, it’s anti-epistemology, it’s systematically wrong. Every rule of rationality that tells you how to find the truth, there’s someone out there who needs you to believe the opposite. If you once tell a lie, the truth is ever after your enemy; and there’s a lot of people out there telling lies.

By adding three lies, one does not get the truth — only a bigger lie.

Lies were like having a pregnant rabbit. One day you had one, but before you knew it, there were rabbits all over the place.

Lies are vile things, with a horrible life of their own. They contaminate the truth that surrounds them.