A Quote by Ambrose Bierce

LIAR, n. One who tells an unpleasant truth.

Ambrose Bierce

Quote Topics

Liar Tells Truth Unpleasant

Quote Author

Ambrose Bierce
American - Journalist
June 24, 1842 - 1914

We don't believe a liar even when he tells the truth.

Marcus Tullius Cicero

A man who lies, thinking it is the truth, is an honest man, and a man who tells the truth, believing it to be a lie, is a liar.

William Safire

Don't lies eventually lead to the truth? And don't all my stories, true or false, tend toward the same conclusion? Don't they all have the same meaning? So what does it matter whether they are true or false if, in both cases, they are significant of what I have been and what I am? Sometimes it is easier to see clearly into the liar than into the man who tells the truth. Truth, like light, blinds. Falsehood, on the contrary, is a beautiful twilight that enhances every object.

Albert Camus

A liar is a liar and lives on the lies he tells and dies in a life of lies.

Carl Sandburg

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.

Harry Frankfurt

Just because something isn't a lie does not mean that it isn't deceptive. A liar knows that he is a liar, but one who speaks mere portions of truth in order to deceive is a craftsman of destruction.

Criss Jami

It is hard to say which is the greatest fool: he who tells the whole truth, or he who tells no truth at all. Character is as necessary in business as in trade. No man can deceive often in either.

Lord Chesterfield

Whenever anyone does as this ad does, plays the actual words of Donald Trump on national television, his response is to yell, "Liar." Their strategy is simply to yell, "Liar, liar, liar."

Ted Cruz

I have been known for some time as a person who speaks the truth and speaks it strongly. I have always called a liar a liar and a hypocrite a hypocrite.

Cindy Sheehan

If anyone tells you he is never afraid, he is a liar or he is a Gurkha.

Sam Manekshaw

It is worse for a liar to tell the truth than for a lover of truth to lie.... There is a truth which is of Satan. Its essence is that under the semblance of truth it denies everything that is real. It lives upon hatred of the real world which is created and loved by God.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer

I know men and women. An honourable man is an honourable man, and a liar is a liar; both are born and not made. One cannot change to the other any more than that same old leopard can change its spots. After a man tells a woman the first untruth of that sort, the others come piling thick, fast, and mountain high.

Gene Stratton-Porter

We always question the bonafides of the man who tells us unpleasant facts.

R.K. Narayan

Every fighter that ever lived had fear. A boy comes to me and tells me that he's not afraid, if I believed him I'd say he's a liar or there's something wrong with him. I'd send him to a doctor to find out what the hell's the matter with him, because this is not a normal reaction. The fighter that's gone into the ring and hasn't experienced fear is either a liar or a psychopath.

Cus D'Amato

Unethical conduct is actually the conduct of destruction and fear; lies are told because one is afraid of the consequences should one tell the truth; thus, the liar is inevitably a coward, the coward is inevitably a liar.