He who dares not offend cannot be honest.

A thief is a man in need. A liar is a man in fear.

When you want to help people, you tell them the truth. When you want to help yourself, you tell them what they want to hear.

And then she understood the devilish cunning of the enemies’ plan. By mixing a little truth with it they had made their lie far stronger.

And even a liar can be scared into telling the truth, same as honest man can be tortured into telling a life.

Lie to a liar, for lies are his coin; steal from a thief, for that is easy; lay a trap for a trickster and catch him at first attempt, but beware of an honest man.

People think that a liar gains a victory over his victim. What I've learned is that a lie is an act of self-abdication, because one surrenders one's reality to the person to whom one lies, making that person one's master, condemning oneself from then on to faking the sort of reality that person's view requires to be faked.

I’m not perfect. And who knows how many times I’ve fallen short. We all fall short. That’s the amazing thing about the grace of God.

No man, for any considerable period, can wear one face to himself, and another to the multitude, without finally getting bewildered as to which may be true.

He who does not desire power is fit to hold it.

The present moment is the only time over which we have dominion.

He who knows nothing is closer to the truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods and errors.

Either you will control your government, or government will control you.

There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the door.

There has never been a shortage of people eager to draw up blueprints for running other people’s lives.

To change your mind and to follow him who sets you straight is to be nonetheless the free agent that you were before.

I have envied a great many people who led difficult lives and led them well.

You assist an evil system most effectively by obeying its orders and decrees. An evil system never deserves such allegiance. Allegiance to it means partaking of the evil. A good person will resist an evil system with his or her whole soul.

My prayer is that when I die, all hell rejoices that I am out of the fight.

It wasn't until late in life that I discovered how easy it is to say "I don't know."

Consensus: the process of abandoning all beliefs, principles, values, and policies in search of something in which no one believes, but to which no one objects; the process of avoiding the very issues that have to be solved, merely because you cannot get agreement on the way ahead. What great cause would have been fought and won under the banner: 'I stand for consensus?

It has always been a mystery to me how men can feel themselves honoured by the humiliation of their fellow-beings.

Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.

But all my life through, the very insistence on truth has taught me to appreciate the beauty of compromise.

When whole races and peoples conspire to propagate gigantic mute lies in the interest of tyrannies and shams, why should we care anything about the trifling lies told by individuals?

Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute.

However much you deny the truth, the truth goes on existing.

The quick pain of truth can pass away, but the slow eating agony of a lie is never lost.

No matter how big the lie; repeat it often enough and the masses will regard it as the truth.

Unthinking respect for authority is the greatest enemy of truth.

Amid the seeming confusion of our mysterious world, individuals are so nicely adjusted to a system, and systems to one another and to a whole, that, by stepping aside for a moment, a man exposes himself to a fearful risk of losing his place forever.

Nothing can now be believed which is seen in the newspaper. Truth itself becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle.