Very interesting quotations about honesty. Let's indulge in them..... come on....
HONESTY
Truly, to tell lies is not honorable;
But when the truth entails tremendous ruin,
To speak dishonorably is pardonable.
Sophocles (c.495-406 BC)
Creusa, fragment 323
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Honesty is generally less profitable than dishonesty.
Plato (c.428-348 BC)
Republic
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The rulers of the State are the only ones who should have the privilege of lying, whether at home or abroad; they may be allowed to lie for the good of the State.
Plato (c.428-348 BC)
Republic
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Pain forces even the innocent to lie.
Publilius Syrus (1st century BC)
Sententiae, Number 171
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It is annoying to be honest to no purpose. (I just feel like laughing reading this)
Ovid (43 BC-AD 18)
Ex Ponto, II, iii, 14
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He who conceals a useful truth is equally guilty with the propagator of an injurious falsehood.
Saint Augustine (340-430)
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Neither a borrower, nor a lender be;
For loan oft loses both itself and friend,
And borrowing dulls the edge of husbandry.
This above all: to thine own self be true,
And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man.
William Shakespeare (1564-1616)
Hamlet, 1600-1601
Act I, scene iii, line 65
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They begin with making falsehood appear like truth, and end with making truth itself appear like falsehood. (True to the politicians)
William Shenstone (1714-1763)
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The more honesty a man has, the less he affects the air of a saint. The affectation of sanctity is a blotch on the face of piety.
Johann Kaspar Lavater (1741-1801)
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A truth that's told with bad intent
Beats all the Lies you can invent. (ha ha)
William Blake (1757-1827)
"Auguries of Innocence", line 53
Poems from the Pickering Manuscript, c.1805
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Oh, what a tangled web we weave,
When first we practice to deceive. (I like this)
Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832)
Marmion, 1808
Canto VI, Introduction, stanza 17
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Honesty is the best policy; but he who is governed by that maxim is not an honest man.
Richard Whately (1787-1863)
Apophthegms, 1854
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A commercial, and in some respects a social, doubt has been started within the last year or two, whether or not it is right to discuss so openly the security or insecurity of locks. Many well-meaning persons suppose that the discussion respecting the means for baffling the supposed safety of locks offers a premium for dishonesty, by showing others how to be dishonest. This is a fallacy. Rogues are very keen in their profession, and already know much more than we can teach them respecting their several kinds of roguery. Rogues knew a good deal about lockpicking long before locksmiths discussed it among themselves, as they have lately done. If a lock -- let it have been made in whatever country, or by whatever maker -- is not so inviolable as it has hitherto been deemed to be, surely it is in the interest of honest persons to know this fact, because the dishonest are tolerably certain to be the first to apply the knowledge practically; and the spread of knowledge is necessary to give fair play to those who might suffer by ignorance. It cannot be too earnestly urged, that an acquaintance with real facts will, in the end, be better for all parties.
-(read again and again to understand this one)
Charles Tomlinson (1808-1897)
"Rudimentary Treatise on the Construction of Locks", 1853
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Sin has many tools, but a lie is the handle which fits them all.
(Proverb like)
Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809-1894)
The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table, 1858
Chapter 6
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Tact is the ability to describe others as they see themselves.
Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865)
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Lying to ourselves is more deeply ingrained than lying to others.
Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821-1881)
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Young as he was, his instinct told him that the best liar is he who makes the smallest amount of lying go the longest way.
Samuel Butler (1835-1902)
The Way of All Flesh, 1903
Chapter 39
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That is English as she is wrote at the Colonial Office. Eleven syllables, many of them of Latin or Greek derivation, when one good English word, a Saxon word of a single syllable, would do! But it is quite sufficient.
Joseph Chamberlain (1836-1914)
23 February 1906
Former colonial secretary, of Churchill’s speech
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"Not that you lied to me but that I no longer believe you - that is what has distressed me-."
Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900)
Part 4 "Maxims and Interludes", Number 183
Beyond Good and Evil, 1885-1886
Translated by R.J. Hollingdale, 1972
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The liar's punishment is not in the least that he is not believed, but that he cannot believe anyone else.
George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)
The Quintessence of Ibsenism, 1890
Chapter 4
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A labour contract into which men enter voluntarily for a limited and for a brief period, under which they are paid wages which they consider adequate, under which they are not bought or sold, and under which they can obtain relief, may not be a desirable contract, may not be a healthy or proper contract, but it cannot in the opinion of His Majesty’s Government be classified as slavery in the extreme acceptance of the word without some risk of terminological inexactitude.
Winston Churchill (1874–1965)
Speech to the House of Commons on the position of indented Chinese
laborers working in the Rand mines in the Transvaal, South Africa
22 February 1906
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Hitler had said that if you tell a big enough lie, people will believe it, but he rather overlooked the fact that once the lie is exposed, everything else you've said is also disbelieved.
Paul Brickhill (1916-1991)
The Great Escape, 1950
Chapter 5
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You don't tell deliberate lies, but sometimes you have to be evasive.
Margaret Thatcher (b.1925), 1976
(Wow, this lady too????)
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Take, for example, the act of lying. We hold the telling of truth as a value; we are not supposed to lie. Yet if everyone told the truth all the time so that one could have complete trust in what one is told, then the advantage that would accrue to a single liar in society would be immense. This is not a stable social situation. On the other hand, in a society of individuals in which everyone lied all the time, society would be unworkable. The equilibrium state seems to be one in which people tell the truth most of the time but occasionally lie, which is how the world really seems to be. In a sense, then, it is the liars among (and within) us that keep us both honest and on our guard. This kind of scientific analysis of lying can help us understand why we do it.
Heinz Rudolph Pagels (1939-1988)
The Dreams of Reason:
The Computer and the Rise of the Sciences of Complexity, 1988
page 330
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To live outside the law you must be honest.
Bob Dylan (b.1941)
"Absolutely Sweet Marie"
Blonde on Blonde, 1966
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We lie to you by not telling you things. We don't lie by telling you things that aren't true.
anonymous
U.S. official
Washington Post
11 January 1991
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And it does matter. An honest man or woman is an honest man or woman more because he or she is honest in the small, everyday things that "don't matter" individually, but which make up a well-lived life, than because of some single great temptation that was passed. A person who is concerned about individual rights or about individual dignity makes his or her difference not because of any sweeping great statement or action, but because of the accretion of small, individually seemingly insignificant acts that spread that dignity and confirm those rights through every action they take. It matters because every action you take, and every action I take is an expression of the human spirit.
William Oliver
Internet newsgroups misc.misc, news.admin, news.groups
15 January 1990
