This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Bertrand Russell, fully Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell
There is no excuse for deceiving children. And when, as must happen in conventional families, they find that their parents have lied, they lose confidence in them and feel justified in lying to them.
Children | Confidence | Lying | Parents |
No one can deny that much of our modern advertising is essentially dishonest; and it can be maintained that to lie freely and all the time for private profit is not to abuse the right of free speech, whether it is a violation of the law or not. But again the practical question is, how much lying for private profit is to be permitted by law?
Abuse | Advertising | Free speech | Law | Lying | Question | Right | Speech | Time |
Must love be ever treated with profaneness as a mere illusion? or with coarseness as a mere impulse? or with fear as a mere disease? or with shame as a mere weakness? or with levity as a mere accident? whereas it is a great mystery and a great necessity, lying at the foundation of human existence, morality, and happiness - mysterious, universal, inevitable as death.
Accident | Death | Disease | Existence | Fear | Illusion | Impulse | Inevitable | Love | Lying | Morality | Mystery | Necessity | Shame | Weakness | Happiness |
There is no such thing as preaching patience into people unless the sermon is so long that they have to practice it while they hear. No man can learn patience except by going out into the hurly-burly world, and taking life just as it blows. Patience is but lying to and riding out the gale.
Life | Life | Lying | Man | Patience | People | Practice | World | Learn |
Time is a necessary representation, lying at the foundation of all our intuitions. With regard to phenomena in general, we cannot think away time from them, and represent them to ourselves as out of and unconnected with time, but we can quite well represent to ourselves time void of phenomena. Time is therefore given a priori. In it alone is all reality of phenomena possible. These may all be annihilated in thought, but in itself, as the universal condition of their possibility, cannot be so annulled.
Lying | Phenomena | Reality | Regard | Thought | Time | Think |
Joseph Chilton Pearce, aka Joe
The toddler is allowed to regulate his own exploratory behavior. What occurs as a result of this entire mechanism is that nature’s imperative to explore the world at large is overwhelmed by the greater imperative to avoid the pain of a broken relationship with the life-giving caregiver. What will be developed in the child is a capacity for deception as he tries to maintain some vestige of integrity while outwardly appearing to conform. Living a lie to survive a lying culture, the child forgets the truth of who he really is.
Behavior | Capacity | Culture | Giving | Integrity | Life | Life | Lying | Nature | Pain | Relationship | Truth | Will | World | Child |
Of all the virtues, is not wisdom the one which the mass of mankind are always claiming, and which most arrouses in them a spirit of contention and lying conceit of wisdom?
Contention | Lying | Mankind | Spirit | Wisdom |
Walter Raleigh, fully Sir Walter Raleigh
The gain of lying is nothing else but not to be trusted of any, nor to be believed when we say the truth.
Fyodor Dostoevsky, fully Fyodor Mikhaylovich Dostoevsky or Feodor Mikhailovich Dostoevski
A man who lies to himself, and believes his own lies, becomes unable to recognize truth, either in himself or in anyone else, and he ends up losing respect for himself and for others. When he has no respect for anyone, he can no longer love, and in him, he yields to his impulses, indulges in the lowest form of pleasure, and behaves in the end like an animal in satisfying his vices. And it all comes from lying — to others and to yourself.
Fyodor Dostoevsky, fully Fyodor Mikhaylovich Dostoevsky or Feodor Mikhailovich Dostoevski
Above all, do not lie to yourself. A man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to a point where he does not discern any truth either in himself or anywhere around him, and thus falls into disrespect towards himself and others. Not respecting anyone, he ceases to love, and having no love, he gives himself up to passions and coarse pleasures, in order to occupy and amuse himself, and in his vices reaches complete bestiality, and it all comes from lying continually to others and to himself.
Disrespect | Lying | Man | Order | Truth |
Friedrich Nietzsche, fully Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
The most common lie is the lie one tells oneself; lying to others is relatively the exception.
Lying |
Normal children often pass through stages of passionate cruelty, laziness, lying and thievery.
Henry Peter Brougham, 1st Baron Brougham and Vaux
Give a child the habit of sacredly regarding the truth--of carefully respecting the property of others--of scrupulously abstaining from all acts of improvidence which can involve him in distress, and he will just as likely think of rushing into the element in which he cannot breathe, as of lying or cheating or stealing.
With attention deficit democracy, I am trying to wake up people to how the combination of mass ignorance, fear mongering by the government, and lying politicians is putting our entire system of government to a death spiral.
Attention | Death | Fear | Government | Lying | People | System | Government |