Eliezer Yudkowsky Quotes

You never monkey with the truth.

I've always operated under the notion that audiences don't always know when they're being lied to, but that they always know when they're being told the truth.

If you have the ability to convince somebody of something that you don't necessarily think is the case, it's a valuable asset. Not that I'm, like, a pathological liar, but we spend most of the day not fully being honest, you know?

Someone who lies and someone who tells the truth are playing on opposite sides, so to speak, in the same game. Each responds to the facts as he understands them, although the response of the one is guided by the authority of the truth, while the response of the other defies that authority and refuses to meet its demands. The bullshitter ignores these demands altogether. 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.

You can create many lies from Truth, but you cannot create any truths from lies.

A lie told well is just as good as the truth.

I have always loved truth so passionately that I have often resorted to lying as a way of introducing it into the minds which were ignorant of its charms.

Truth is a great flirt.

For, if a good speaker, never so eloquent, does not see into the fact, and is not speaking the truth of that - is there a more horrid kind of object in creation?

For me, the facts in anything are always secondary. You don't lie convincingly with the truth. You lie convincingly with being a good liar.

A German is someone who cannot tell a lie without believing it himself.

Most people don't care if you're telling them the truth or if you're telling them a lie, as long as they're entertained by it.

Working as a journalist, I was always tempted to lie. I felt I could do dialogue better than the person I was interviewing. I felt I could lie better than Nixon and be more concise than some random person I was covering.

If we were to abandon concern for what is true, what is false, and what remains indeterminate, the world would be totally chaotic. Even those who deny the importance of truth, on the one hand, are quick to jump on anyone who is caught lying.

In my latter years I've decided that there's too much to keep track of when you go into the lying game. That becomes stressful and it's not for me anymore.

In argument, truth always prevails finally; in politics, falsehood always.

Anybody can make something up and have it sound believable. The hard part is remembering all the lies you've told, and all the people you've told them to, and then living the lies that have become your life.

I don't use the word 'lying' easily.

That's the part I kept trying to say on Queen Radio: I don't have to believe you because you're saying it. I'm not saying you're a liar, I learned that long ago too. There's a big difference between you're a liar and I don't believe you.

Men lie, women lie, numbers don't.

Listen: women lie, men lie, but numbers don't lie, guy.

Women lie, men lie, numbers don't.

A big lie is more plausible than truth.

American traditions and the American ethic require us to be truthful, but the most important reason is that truth is the best propaganda and lies are the worst. To be persuasive we must be believable; to be believable we must be credible; to be credible we must be truthful. It is as simple as that.

The truth is a precious commodity. That's why I use it so sparingly.