Truth and Lies/Quotes

Sir, I don't know if he's worth talking to, sir, but he may be worth listening to. Even if you think he'll only tell us lies. Because sometimes, sir, the way people tell you lies, if they tell you enough lies, well, they sort of . . . show you what shape the truth is, sir. And we don't have to tell him the truth, sir. We could lie to him, too

—Polly, Monstrous Regiment

The truth now, Calpurnia. We are both too wretched for lies.

—Confessor Orovene, Blind

The Daemon lied with every breath. It could not help itself but to deceive and dismay, to riddle and ruin. The more we conversed, the closer I came to a single, ineluctable fact: I would gain no wisdom here. The Daemon's mind was a labyrinth of deceptions. Truth was trammeled at the very heart of the maze, far beyond my meager reach.

—The Liber Malefic, Warhammer 40,000

The truth is rarely pure and never simple. Life would be quite tedious if it were either.

—Algernon Moncrieff, The Importance of Being Earnest

PHB: You must quantity the unquatifiable, and that can only be done by a process called lying.
Asok: Lying is a process?
PHB: It can be, if you use enough powerpoint slides.

—Dilbert

Bashir: But the point [of "The Boy Who Cried Wolf"] is, if you lie all the time, nobody's going to believe you, even when you're telling the truth.
Garak: Are you sure that's the point, doctor?
Bashir: Of course, what else could it be?
Garak: That you should never tell the same lie twice.

—Star Trek: Deep Space Nine

I write to you not because you do not know the truth, but because you do, and because every lie is alien to the truth.

—1 John 2:21