50 All-Time Classic Quotes About Lying

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Shutterstock / ruigsantos

1.

Women lie about their age; men lie about their income.
—William Feather

2.

Lying is the most fun a woman can have without taking her clothes off.
—Natalie Portman

3.

Clinton lied. A man might forget where he parks or where he lives, but he never forgets oral sex, no matter how bad it is.
—Barbara Bush

4.

Lying is an elementary means of self-defense.
—Susan Sontag

5.

If someone's lying about something small, you don't know what else they're lying about. I'm a big girl, I can handle the truth—even if it's not good news.
—Jennifer Morrison

6.

I can take any truth; just don't lie to me.
—Barbra Streisand

7.

The thing about lying to your parents is, you have to do it to protect them. It's for their own good.
—Sophie Kinsella

8.

When you learn that a truth is a lie, anger follows.
—Grace Slick

9.

If you tell the truth, you don't have to remember anything.
—Mark Twain

10.

A lie cannot live.
—Martin Luther King, Jr.

11.

History is a set of lies agreed upon.
—Napoléon Bonaparte

12.

I'm not upset that you lied to me; I'm upset that from now on I can't believe you.
—Friedrich Nietzsche

13.

I always tell the truth. Even when I lie.
—Al Pacino

14.

I lie to myself all the time. But I never believe me.
—S. E. Hinton

15.

Oh, I love to lie. That's one of my favorite things in the world, coming up to somebody, especially press people, and telling them some enormous lie that couldn't possibly be true.
—Alice Cooper

16.

Governments are supposed to lie to their citizens.
—Noam Chomsky

17.

Regardless of how far a person runs, a lie will eventually catch up to them.
—Donald L. Hicks

18.

Lies are like cockroaches, for every one you discover there are many more that are hidden.
—Gary Hopkins

19.

Lying can never save us from another lie.
—Vaclav Havel

20.

Well, when I was younger, I lied all the time, because once you understand the power of lying, it's really like magic because you transform reality for people.
—Louis C. K.

21.

There are some good people. But a good chunk of them will lie for no reason at all—it'll be ten o'clock and they'll tell you it's nine. You're looking at the clock and you can't even fathom why they're lying. They just lie because that's what they do.
—John Cusack

22.

Because you're a girl and when a girl says she's fine, she's lying.
—J. A. George

23.

I have one major problem with the Internet: It's full of liars. There doesn't seem to be any way to answer to people lying about you.
—John Lydon

24.

Lying is not only a defense mechanism; it's also a coping mechanism and a survival technique.
—Monica Raymund

25.

Things come apart so easily when they have been held together with lies.
—Dorothy Allison

26.

Magic is an art form where you lie and tell people you are lying.
—Teller

27.

For every good reason there is to lie, there is a better reason to tell the truth.
—Bo Bennett

28.

A lie that is half-truth is the darkest of all lies.
—Alfred Lord Tennyson

29.

By a lie, a man…annihilates his dignity as a man.
—Immanuel Kant

30.

A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on.
—Winston Churchill

31.

Lying to ourselves is more deeply ingrained than lying to others.
—Fyodor Dostoyevsky

32.

All the truth in the world adds up to one big lie.
—Bob Dylan

33.

If it is necessary sometimes to lie to others, it is always despicable to lie to oneself.
—W. Somerset Maugham

34.

Tact: to lie about others as you would have them lie about you.
—Oliver Herford

35.

I got a feeling about political correctness. I hate it. It causes us to lie silently instead of saying what we think.
—Hal Holbrook

36.

No lie ever reaches old age.
—Sophocles

37.

Lying is easy. But it's lonely.
—Victoria Schwab

38.

The slickest way in the world to lie is to tell the right amount of truth at the right time-and then shut up.
—Robert A. Heinlein

39.

Someone who knows too much finds it hard not to lie.
—Ludwig Wittgenstein

40.

In his opinion, all the world's misfortunes stemmed from the countless untruths, both deliberate and unintentional, which people told because of haste or carelessness.
—Michael Ende

41.

Clovis believed that if a lie was worth telling it was worth telling well.
—Saki

42.

You may tell the greatest lies and wear a brilliant disguise, but you can't escape the eyes of the one who sees right through you.
—Tom Robbins

43.

Don't lie. Life is a puzzle and we are all unique pieces. When you lie, you make it impossible to find your true place in the grand design.
—Steve Maraboli

44.

Yeah, it never fails to amaze me how a single lie can undo an entire lifetime of good.
—Sherrilyn Kenyon

45.

When you become complacent with someone lying, whether it is a close friend, the media, or your government, then you have essentially given them permission to continue to do so and most often at your expense.
—Gary Hopkins

46.

This is an absurd moral, for you and I both know that sometimes not only is it good to lie, it is necessary to lie.
—Lemony Snicket

47.

To lie, of course, is to engender insanity.
—Anais Nin

48.

Who lies for you will lie against you.
—Bosnian Proverb

49.

A lie told often enough becomes the truth.
—Vladimir Lenin

50.

Lie until even you believe it—that's the real secret of lying.
—Holly Black
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