A Quote by Alfred Lord Tennyson

A lie which is half a truth is ever the blackest of lies.

Alfred Lord Tennyson

Quote Topics

Truth Ever Half Lie Lies Truth Is Which

Quote Author

Alfred Lord Tennyson
British - Poet
August 6, 1809 - October 6, 1892

People think that a liar gains a victory over his victim. What I’ve learned is that a lie is an act of self-abdication, because one surrenders one’s reality to the person to whom one lies, making that person one’s master, condemning oneself from then on to faking the sort of reality that person’s view requires to be faked…The man who lies to the world, is the world’s slave from then on…There are no white lies, there is only the blackest of destruction, and a white lie is the blackest of all.

Ayn Rand

There are no white lies, there is only the blackest of destruction, and a white lie is the blackest of all.

Ayn Rand

I look at the human sciences as poetic sciences in which there is no objectivity, and I see film as not being objective, and cinema verite as a cinema of lies that depends on the art of telling yourself lies. If you’re a good storyteller then the lie is more true than reality, and if you’re a bad one, the truth is worse than a half lie.

Jean Rouch

Among other common lies, we have the silent lie - the deception which one conveys by simply keeping still and concealing the truth. Many obstinate truth-mongers indulge in this dissipation, imagining that if they speak no lie, they lie not at all.

Mark Twain

The result of a consistent and total substitution of lies for factual truth is not that the lie will now be accepted as truth, and truth be defamed as lie, but that the sense by which we take our bearings in the real world - and the category of truth versus falsehood is among the mental means to this end - is being destroyed.

Hannah Arendt

To tell a lie in cowardice, to tell a lie for gain, or to avoid deserved punishment--are all the blackest of black lies.

Emily Post

A lie that is half-truth is the darkest of all lies.

Alfred Lord Tennyson

On the eve of the election last month my wife Judith and I were driving home late in the afternoon and turned on the radio for the traffic and weather. What we instantly got was a freak show of political pornography: lies, distortions, and half-truths - half-truths being perhaps the blackest of all lies. They paraded before us as informed opinion.

Bill Moyers

There is at least one truth to every myth, and it takes one truth to create a lie. Lies can be formed from Truth; however, Truth cannot be formed from lies.

Suzy Kassem

A lie that is half a truth is ever the hardest to fight.

Patricia Wentworth

Knowing can be a curse on a person's life. I'd traded in a pack of lies for a pack of truth, and I didn't know which one was heavier. Which one took the most strength to carry around? It was a ridiculous question, though, because once you know the truth, you can't ever go back and pick up your suitcase of lies. Heavier or not, the truth is yours now.

Sue Monk Kidd

The Kafka paradox: art depends on truth, but truth, being indivisable, cannot know itself: to tell the truth is to lie. thus the writer is the truth, and yet when he speakes he lies.

Franz Kafka

People on the Continent either tell you the truth or lie; in England they hardly ever lie, but they would not dream of telling you the truth.

George Mikes

That a lie which is all a lie may be met and fought with outright, But a lie which is part a truth is a harder matter to fight.

Alfred Lord Tennyson

Good propaganda does not need to lie, indeed it may not lie. It has no reason to fear the truth. It is a mistake to believe that people cannot take the truth. They can. It is only a matter of presenting the truth to people in a way that they will be able to understand. A propaganda that lies proves that it has a bad cause. It cannot be successful in the long run.