A Quote by H. L. Mencken

It is hard to believe that a man is telling the truth when you know that you would lie if you were in his place. — © H. L. Mencken
It is hard to believe that a man is telling the truth when you know that you would lie if you were in his place.
You know, they say that there is a part of the human chest that it you strike it hard enough, it makes the person’s heart explode. This sounds like such a lie that I have to believe it’s the truth. If I were science, I’d never tell anyone where this place is. If I were science, I’d have named this place after you.
Confidence: The feeling that makes one believe a man, even when one knows that one would lie in his place
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.
With all the justifications I have had in place, telling the truth under certain circumstances was in my universe no different than telling a lie or withholding.
The president is on national TV apologizing for getting oral sex. Why didn't he just stick with his lie? You got to stick with your lie. If you lie, you have to believe that lie whole-heartedly. It has to become the truth for you. But this man, the most powerful man in the world, is on national TV apologizing for receiving oral sex. He's an idiot. There are men sitting in here right now who would gladly accept oral sex on national TV.
Telling a lie is called wrong. Telling the truth is called right. Except when telling the truth is called bad manners and telling a lie is called polite.
A man follows the path laid out for him. He does his duty to God and his King. He does what he must do, not what pleases him. God's truth, boy, what kind of world would this be if every man did what pleased him alone? Who would plough the fields and reap the harvest, if every man had the right to say, 'I don't want to do that.' In this world there is a place for every man, but every man must know his place.
And even a liar can be scared into telling the truth, same as honest man can be tortured into telling a lie.
I lay my head on his chest and listen to his heart beating, solid and sure.....he reads me so well. He's known about my emotional empathy since we were children. Nothing disturbs him...Few can lie to me... I don't know the truth, only that there is a lie. It takes a scrupulously honest man to love me. That's my Sean. We learned to trust each other completely before we were old enough to have learned suspicion.
Richard Nixon is a no good, lying bastard. He can lie out of both sides of his mouth at the same time, and if he ever caught himself telling the truth, he'd lie just to keep his hand in.
I'd always thought telling the truth to other people was hard, but maybe that was a snap compared to telling the truth to yourself. Sometimes we just refused to know what we knew.
If there was twenty ways of telling the truth and only one way of telling a lie, the Government would find it out. It's in the nature of governments to tell lies.
It is better to be divided by truth than to be united in error. It is better to speak the truth that hurts and then heals, than falsehood that comforts and then kills. It is better to be hated for telling the truth than to be loved for telling a lie. It is better to stand alone with the truth, than to be wrong with a multitude. It is better to ultimately succeed with the truth than to temporarily succeed with a lie. There is only one Gospel.
By a lie a man throws away and, as it were, annihilates his dignity as a man. A man who himself does not believe what he tells another ... has even less worth than if he were a mere thing. ... makes himself a mere deceptive appearance of man, not man himself.
Man must learn to know the universe precisely as it is, or he cannot successfully find his place in it. A man should therefore use his reasoning faculty in all matters involving truth, and especially as concerning his religion. He must learn to distinguish between truth and error.
The true value of man is not determined by his possession, supposed or real, of Truth, but rather by his sincere exertion to get to the Truth. It is not possession of Truth by which he extends his powers and in which his ever-growing perfectability is to be found. Possession makes one passive, indolent and proud. If God were to hold all Truth concealed in his right hand, and in his left only the steady and diligent drive for Truth, albeit with the proviso that I would always and forever err in the process, and to offer me the choice, I would with all humility take the left hand.
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