Mike Wallace Quotes

After a while, you have no idea how old you are because you've lied so many times.

There are three kind of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.

Sometimes it is necessary to make things clearer than the truth.

That's not a lie, it's a terminological inexactitude.

Oh, they never lie. They dissemble, evade, prevaricate, confound, confuse, distract, obscure, subtly misrepresent and willfully misunderstand with what often appears to be a positively gleeful relish and are generally perfectly capable of contriving to give one an utterly unambiguous impression of their future course of action while in fact intending to do exactly the opposite, but they never lie. Perish the thought.

To mystify, in the active sense, is to befuddle, cloud, obscure, mask whatever is going on, whether this be experience, action, or process, or whatever is "the issue." It induces confusion in the sense that there is failure to see what is "really" being experienced, or being done, or going on, and failure to distinguish or discriminate the actual issues. This entails the substitution of false for true constructions of what is being experienced, being done (praxis), or going on (process), and the substitution of false issues for the actual issues.

I compare it with a lie, which like to a snowball, the longer it is rolled the greater it becomes.

The scare quotes burn off like fog.

A lie hides the truth. A story tries to find it.

Change lays her hand not upon the truth.

I did a lot of lying. I went through a big lying phase when I was in like third and fourth grade. I told all my friends I was in Les Misérables, and I was not. I also told them I was an Indian princess. Also not an Indian princess.

The truth, as the light, makes blind.

Let the people know my wisdom, fill the land with smoke

Lawyers spend their professional careers shoveling smoke.

If you walk backwards, you'll find out you can go forwards and people won't know if you're coming or going.

A charlatan makes obscure what is clear; a thinker makes clear what is obscure.

Well, I always talk about how I used to work at an insane asylum and stuff, which is true, but to be honest, I just make crap up more than anything else.

He who attempts to make others believe in means which he himself despises is a puffer; he who makes use of more means than he knows to be necessary is a quack; and he who ascribes to those means a greater efficacy than his own experience warrants is an impostor.

I have "fat-guy syndrome." If they give me $50 million to make a movie, I'll try to make it look like it cost a hundred. If they give me $60 million, I'll try to make it look like it cost $120.

He who sincerely seeks his real purpose in life is himself sought by that purpose. As he concentrates on that search a light begins to clear his confusion, call it revelation, call it inspiration, call it what you will. It is mistrust that misleads. Sincerity leads straight to the goal.

Intellectual sodomy, which comes from the refusal to be simple about plain matters, is as gross and abundant today as sexual perversion and they are nowise different from one another.

All this [Paul's writing] is nothing better than the jargon of a conjurer who picks up phrases he does not understand to confound the credulous people who come to have their fortune told. Age of Reason

If you can't convince 'em, confuse 'em.

And when all was said and done the lies a fellow told about himself couldn't probably hold a proverbial candle to the wholesale whoppers other fellows coined about him.

The bullshitter is neither on the side of the true or the side of the false. His eye is not on the facts at all. He does not reject the authority of the truth, as the liar does, and oppose himself to it. He pays no attention to it at all. By virtue of this, bullshit is a greater enemy of the truth than lies are.