Michel de Montaigne Quotes

Lying is a most disgraceful vice; it first despises God, and then fears men.

Lying is a terrible vice, it testifies that one despises God, but fears men.

To say that a man lieth, is as much to say, as that he is brave towards God, and a coward towards men.

A lie faces God and shrinks from man.

Sir, he [Bolingbroke] was a scoundrel and a coward: a scoundrel for charging a blunderbuss against religion and morality; a coward, because he had not resolution to fire it off himself, but left half a crown to a beggarly Scotsman to draw the trigger at his death.

But Bill Clinton had the good taste to lie about his sexual peccadillos. He had the honor and the decency to want to cover it up.

Perjury is the basest and meanest and most cowardly of crimes. What can it do? Perjury can change the common air that we breathe into the axe of an executioner.

Lord, Lord, how subject we old men are to this vice of lying!

Like many people, I have a fascination with lies and the people who tell them. I wouldn't say I've never told a lie, but I don't think I've ever told one without both assuming I would be found out and feeling absolutely rotten about it.

The only vice that cannot be forgiven is hypocrisy. The repentance of a hypocrite is itself hypocrisy.

Hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue.

There's good and bad everywhere in any aspect in life. The only people who we can't really trust are politicians. Because those guys lie to everybody and constantly.

Lying just for the fun of it is either art or pathology.

The truthful man is usually a liar.

Honesty is of God and dishonesty of the devil; the devil was a liar from the beginning.

Because hypocrisy stinks in the nostrils one is likely to rate it as a more powerful agent for destruction than it is.

It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle or a rich man to enter the kingdom of Heaven, than for a politician to lay aside disguise.

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

I hope you have not seriously taken amiss my certainly quite cowardly statements…. I wanted to remain free and could not do so without great duplicity.

The moral state of society was most terrible. We stole from ourselves, took and gave bribes, lied in the reports, in newspapers, from high podiums. And all of this from top to bottom; from bottom to top.

The morality of [Donald] Trump’s lying didn’t bother me, but he is a stupid liar.

Don't disrespect me, lie about it, and then come smile in my face and act like nothing's wrong.

Sin is the reason we are racist, prejudiced, and lie to cover for our own.

The world is full of cravens who pretended to be heroes.

Lord, Lord, how this world is given to lying!