Famous Quotes & Sayings

Germaine Greer

The first kiss ideally signals rapture, exchange of hearts, and imminent marriage. Otherwise it is a kiss that lies. All very crude and nonsensical, and yet it is the staple myth of hundreds of comics called 'Sweethearts,' 'Romantic Secrets' and so forth. The state induced by the kiss is actually self-induced, of course, for few lips are so gifted with electric and psychedelic possibilities.

Gertrude Stein

Even the propagandists on the radio find it very difficult to really say let alone believe that the world will be a happy place, of love and peace and plenty, and that the lion will lie down with the lamb and everybody will believe anybody.

Gerard Way

I see you lying next to me, with words I thought i'd never speak, awake and unafraid, asleep or dead?

Havelock Ellis

The Promised Land always lies on the other side of a Wilderness.

Harry Hopkins

Three or four million heads of households don't turn into tramps and cheats overnight, nor do they lose the habits and standards of a lifetime... They don't drink any more than the rest of us, they don't lie any more, they're no lazier than the rest of us.... An eighth or a tenth of the earning population does not change its character which has been generations in the molding, or, if such a change actually occurs, we can scarcely charge it up to personal sin.

Harry Frankfurt

It is impossible for someone to lie unless he thinks he knows the truth. Producing bullshit requires no such conviction.

Harry Frankfurt

It is impossible for someone to lie unless he thinks he knows the truth. A person who lies is thereby responding to the truth, and he is to that extent respectful of it.

Harry Frankfurt

Bullshit is a greater enemy of the truth than lies are.

Harry Emerson Fosdick

I hate war for its consequences, for the lies it lives on and propagates, for the undying hatreds it arouses...

Hans-Georg Gadamer

The ambiguity of poetic language answers to the ambiguity of human life as a whole, and therein lies its unique value. All interpretations of poetic language only interpret what the poetry has already interpreted.

Frances Farmer

I used to lie between cool, clean sheets at night after I'd had a bath, after I had washed my hair and scrubbed my knuckles and finger-nails and teeth. Then I could lie quite still in the dark with my face to the window with the trees in it, and talk to God.

Floyd Abrams

That doesn't necessarily mean that the story isn't true, ... But what it does mean, then, is that at this moment we simply do not have enough evidence, in my view, for any conclusion to be reached - that the presidents have been lying to us for all these years and that what we've been told was just a pack of lies.

Floyd Mayweather, Jr.

I would lie in bed, and I was nine years old, and say to myself: 'I want to be the richest man in the world.' I've come a long way from there.

Fran Lebowitz

I believe in talent. I know you're not supposed to believe in that anymore because you're supposed to believe if you just work hard you can do anything. That's how you succeed, maybe. But talent is something you're born with. You cannot acquire it by working hard, and you cannot lose it by lying around either.

Fran Lebowitz

If you feel the urge to write, just lie down and read a book: it will pass.

George Washington

Father I cannot tell a lie. I did it with my little hatchet.

George Washington

In the composition of the human frame there is a good deal of inflammable matter, however dormant it may lie for a time.

George Washington

I cannot tell a lie. I cut down the cherry tree.

George Washington

I hate deception, even where the imagination only is concerned.

George Santayana

Better not be a hero than work oneself up into heroism by shouting lies.

George Santayana

In this world we must either institute conventional forms of expression or else pretend that we have nothing to express; the choice lies between a mask and a figleaf.

George Santayana

The little word is has its tragedies: it marries and identifies different things with the greatest innocence; and yet no two are ever identical, and if therein lies the charm of wedding them and calling them one, therein too lies the danger.

George Santayana

Wisdom lies in taking everything with good humor and a grain of salt.

George Santayana

Advertising is the modern substitute for argument, its function is to make the worse appear the better article. A confused competition of all propagandas -- those insults to human nature -- is carried on by the most expert psychological methods -- for instance, by always repeating a lie.

George Packer

Since I was a kid. I had this series by Ballantine Books about the history of World Wars I and II. In my 20s, it was the Vietnam War literature of novelists like Tim O'Brien, Philip Caputo, and Tobias Wolff, and then nonfiction such as "A Bright Shining Lie" by Neil Sheehan and "The Best and Brightest" by David Halberstam . Those are the two best histories of Vietnam.

George Orwell

A man who gives a good account of himself is probably lying, since any life when viewed from the inside is simply a series of defeats.

George Orwell

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

George Orwell

The choice for mankind lies between freedom and happiness and for the great bulk of mankind, happiness is better.

George Orwell

And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed—if all records told the same tale—then the lie passed into history and became truth. 'Who controls the past' ran the Party slogan, 'controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.

George Orwell

For the ordinary man is passive. Within a narrow circle (home life, and perhaps the trade unions or local politics) he feels himself master of his fate, but against major events he is as helpless as against the elements. So far from endeavoring to influence the future, he simply lies down and lets things happen to him.

George Orwell

The past was erased, the erasure was forgotten, the lie became the truth.

George Meyer

If there's reason for hope, it lies in man's occasional binges of cooperation. To save our planet, we'll need that kind of heroic effort, in which all types of people join forces for the common good

G. Gordon Liddy

One of the biggest lies in the world is that crime doesn't pay. Of course, crime pays.