Richard Brinsley Sheridan Quotes

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.

To have lied is to have suffered.

You never feel good when you lie. It doesn't matter how much you want something, if you lie to somebody you love, and they actually, sincerely believe you, you feel like a cockroach that needs some serious Raid action.

Once you tell your first lie, the first time you lie for him, you are in it with him, and then you are lost.

With other people, Hilly hands out lies like the Presbyterians hand out guilt, but it's our own silent agreement, this strict honesty, perhaps the one thing that has kept us friends

When a man lies, he murders some part of the world.

I was living a complete lie. But unfortunately, guilt doesn't make you stop.

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

Oaths are crutches, upon which lies go.

I chose to compromise my principles. I broke my promise to always tell the truth.

To tell a falsehood is like the cut of a saber: for though the wound may heal, the scar of it will remain.

A lie faces God and shrinks from man.

He who permits himself to tell a lie once, finds it much easier to do it the second time.

If I told you, you might be forced to lie about it. Not that you aren't really good at it, but why put an old man in that position?

Is it possible to tell the truth in a society of lies? Or must you always, of necessity, become a liar?

I never lie," I said offhand. "At least not to those I don't love.

When Knaves betray each other, one can scarce be blamed or the other pitied.

Who keeps on loving you when you've been lying, saying things that ain't what they seem? God does, but I don't. God will, but I won't.

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.

Cheating gets easier every time it's done. It's only hard the first time, when one feels the sting of morality and the guilt of betraying someone's trust.

I never like to be lied to by a girlfriend or agent, and certainly not the president of the United States.

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

Only enemies speak the truth; friends and lovers lie endlessly, caught in the web of duty.

On that road of the informer, it is always night. I cannot ever inform against anyone without feeling something die within me. I inform without pleasure, because it is necessary.

To me, horror is when I see somebody lying. I mean a person I know. A friend. And he's telling me something that I accept. And then suddenly, as he or she is telling it, there's something that gives them away. They're not telling me the truth.