H. L. Mencken Quotes

When we tell little white lies, we become progressively color-blind. It is better to remain silent than to mislead.

Know that a lie is not haram [wrong] in itself, but only because the evil conclusions to which it leads the hearer, making him believe something that is not really the case.... If a lie is the only way of obtaining a good result, it is permissible.... We must lie when truth leads to unpleasant results.

So telling a lie becomes a sin if you tell it to take advantage of a person, but if you tell a lie to do a good thing for him that is not a sin. Even God tells lies very often; you can see this throughout history.

What harm would it do, if a man told a good strong lie for the sake of the good and for the Christian church ... a lie out of necessity, a useful lie, a helpful lie, such lies would not be against God, he would accept them.

Telling the truth and making someone cry is better than telling a lie and making someone smile.

I am my own judge of what truths I shall tell. The truth can do just as much harm as a lie.

I detest the man who hides on thing in the depths of his heart and speaks forth another.

There was a distinction between lying and telling half-truths, but it was a very narrow one.

The truth is far from you, so you know you got to lie. Then you're all the time defending what you can never justify.

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.

Lies are neither bad nor good. Like a fire they can either keep you warm or burn you to death, depending on how they're used.

I'm neutral on lying, seeing as how there's times when the truth just hurts people.

Realizing that people should lie when they do makes me a little more open-minded, a little more tolerant, when my child or my partner lies.

Lying's wrong, but when the world spins backwards, a small wrong may be a big right.

Lies like that are not a sin, they are a sacrifice.

In plain truth, lying is an accursed vice. We are not men, nor have any other tie upon another, but by our word.

To hell with the truth! As the history of the world proves, the truth has no bearing on anything. It's irrelevant and immaterial, as the lawyers say. The lie of a pipe dream is what gives life to the whole misbegotten mad lot of us, drunk or sober.

There are worse things than a lie... I have found... that it may be well to choose one sin in order that another may be shunned.

His mind reeled. Now, empowered to ask questions of utmost rudeness-and promised answers-he could, conceivably (though it was almost unimaginable), ask someone, some adult, his father perhaps: "Do you lie?" But he would have no way of knowing if the answer he received was true.

The men the American people admire most extravagantly are the most daring liars; the men they detest most violently are those who try to tell them the truth.

Nobody has the right to put another under such a difficulty that he must either hurt the person by telling the truth or hurt himself by telling what is not true.

One must lie under certain circumstances and at all times when one can't do anything about them.

I am prepared to maintain that Honesty is essentially an anarchistic and disintegrating force in society, that communities are held together and the progress of civilization made possible only by vigorous and sometimes even, violent Lying; that the Social Contract is nothing more or less than a vast conspiracy of human beings to lie and humbug themselves and one another for the general Good.

Because everybody lies. It's part of living in society. Don't get me wrong-I think it's necessary. The last thing anyone wants is to live in a society where total honesty prevails. Can you imagine the conversations? You're short and fat, one person might say, and the other might answer, I know. But you smell bad. It just wouldn't work. So people lie by omission all the time. People will tell you most of the story...and I've learned that the part they neglect to tell you is often the most important part. People hide the truth because they're afraid." -Jo