Marcus Tullius Cicero Quotes

Truth is beautiful, without doubt; but so are lies.

Truth is a naked and open daylight, that does not show the masques, and mummeries, and triumphs of the world, half so stately and daintily as candle-lights. . . A mixture of a lie doth ever add pleasure

A lie cannot live.

Weaklings must lie.

No one can be happy who has been thrust outside the pale of truth. And there are two ways that one can be removed from this realm: by lying, or by being lied to.

Society can exist only on the basis that there is some amount of polished lying and that no one says exactly what he thinks.

If one is to be called a liar, one may as well make an effort to deserve the name.

I am not sincere, even when I say I am not.

I have known a vast quantity of nonsense talked about bad men not looking you in the face. Don't trust that conventional idea. Dishonesty will stare honesty out of countenance any day in the week, if there is anything to be got by it.

It's discouraging to think how many people are shocked by honesty and how few by deceit.

I always divide people into two groups. Those who live by what they know to be a lie, and those who live by what they believe, falsely, to be the truth.

The essence of lying is in deception, not in words.

All deception in the course of life is indeed nothing else but a lie reduced to practice, and falsehood passing from words into things.

It takes a wise man to handle a lie, a fool had better remain honest.

Lying is not only saying what isn't true. It is also, in fact especially, saying more than is true and, in the case of the human heart, saying more than one feels. We all do it, every day, to make life simpler.

If what is communicated is false, it can hardly be called communication.

The trouble with lying and deceiving is that their efficiency depends entirely upon a clear notion of the truth that the liar and deceiver wishes to hide.

What bothers me is that Jim Bakker lies. Jim Bakker knows for a fact that I was virgin.

Very few of us are what we seem.

One may sometimes tell a lie, but the grimace that accompanies it tells the truth.

Put away from you a dissembling mouth.

I doubt he knows himself when he’s not telling the truth.

Liars sometimes tell the truth; they don’t tell lies all the time.

Nothing is more perilous than truth in a world that lies.

The first thing a man will do for his ideals is lie.