H. G. Wells Quotes

Lies are the mortar that binds the savage individual man into the social masonry.

So near is falsehood to truth that a wise man would do well not to trust himself on the narrow edge.

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

An untruth must be spoken, where need requires. For whether men lie, or say true, it is with one and the same object. Men lie, because they think to gain by deceiving others; and speak the truth, because they expect to get something by their true speaking, and to be trusted afterwards in more important matters. Thus, though their conduct is so opposite, the end of both is alike. If there were no gain to be got, your true-speaking man would tell untruths as much as your liar, and your liar would tell the truth as much as your true-speaking man.

Man has an inexhuastible faculty for lying, especially to himself.

It is the human wish to be told lies that keep us as primitive morally and socially as we are. I am persuaded that a lie grounded in human desire is too powerful for mere reason to kill.

I was brought up with lies all the time... that's how you got along... I have lied my entire life...

Humanity is less, far less than the individual, because the individual may sometimes be capable of truth, and humanity is a tree of lies.

With union grounded on falsehood and ordering us to speak and act lies, we will not have anything to do. Peace? A brutal lethargy is peaceable; the noisome is peaceable. We hope for a living peace, not a dead one!

They've lied about everything.-about the fence, and the existence of Invalids, about a million other things besides. They told us the raids were carried out for our own protection. They told us the regulators were only interested in keeping the peace. They told us love was a disease. They told us it would kill us in the end. For the very first time I realize, that this, too, maight also be a lie.

The most outrageous lies that can be invented will find believers if a person only tells them with all his might.

I would start drinking something terrible if I were in a situation where I was surrounded by lies or quiet or secrets. It's just not a real life.

All propaganda is lies, even when one is telling the truth.

The truth is still the truth whether or not you believe it. Can we say the same about lies? No, lies only exist because we believe them. If we don't believe in lies, they simply disappear.

You know what lies are for.

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

We are all created to be miserable, and that we all know it, and all invent means of deceiving each other. And when one sees the truth, what is one to do?

Observance of customs and laws can very easily be a cloak for a lie so subtle that our fellow human beings are unable to detect it.

I have followed after the truth, across this windy planet upon which every person is nourished by one or another lie.

Truth is treason in the empire of lies.

Our lies reveal as much about us as our truths

Truth is the first thing that present-day literature lacks. The writer has drowned himself in lies, he is too accustomed to speak prudently, with a careful look over his shoulder.

Since I wasn't able to leave a succession of beautiful lies, I want to leave the smidgen of truth that the falsehood of everything lets us suppose we can tell.

But still, if it's true, how can it be a lie?

Lying about things large and small has become so accepted by so many that they even lie about lying.