A Quote by Karl Kraus

A white lie is always pardonable. But he who tells the truth without compulsion merits no leniency.

Karl Kraus

Quote Topics

Always Compulsion Leniency Lie Merits Tells Truth White White Lie Without

Quote Author

Karl Kraus
Austrian - Writer
April 28, 1874 - June 12, 1936

Glorify a lie, legalize a lie, arm and equip a lie, consecrate a lie with solemn forms and awful penalties, and after all it is nothing but a lie. It rots a land and corrupts a people like any other lie, and by and by the white light of God's truth shines clear through it, and shows it to be a lie.

Edwin Hubbel Chapin

Picasso said, 'Art is a lie that tells the truth.' What if you just want to tell the truth and not lie about it?

Nicolas Cage

Picasso said art is a lie that tells the truth. What if you just want to tell the truth and not lie about it?

Nicolas Cage

Governments lie; bankers lie; even auditors sometimes lie: gold tells the truth.

William Rees-Mogg

Sarah Paulson doesn't lie. Like, in life. But she doesn't lie onscreen, and you can't take your eyes off somebody who always tells the truth. She's the most honest person I've ever met.

Sterling K. Brown

Pablo Picasso said, "Art is the lie that tells the truth," and it's not a terribly radical statement. It's always been that you can tell truth through fiction. And this idea also comes from nuclear physics.

Momus

I can't lie - I have one of those faces where you can tell. It's expressive and lends itself to being cheeky. I always tell the truth even when I should probably tell a white lie.

Jessica Barden

Suppose whether or not someone tells me a lie depends only on whether he wants to, but he is morally indifferent, he doesn't care much about the truth or about me, and his self interest, which he worships, tells him to lie, and so it comes about that given his psychology, it is a forgone conclusion that he will lie to me. I think in this case he is still blameworthy, and that implies, among other things, that he did something he ought not do.

Nomy Arpaly

Language always betrays us, tells the truth when we want to lie, and dissolves into formlessness when we would most like to be precise.

Jeanette Winterson

I like the idea of what happens when someone tells a small white lie - which I think is the premise of the show - and how it has ripple effects, so really it's also about raising the stakes of this little lie.

Darren Star

I would be mute, beautiful, changless as the earth for you. I would be your memory, without age, always innocent, always waiting in the King's white house. I would do that for you and no other man inthe relm. But it would be a lie and I will do anything but lie to you - I swear that.

Patricia A. McKillip

We writers – and especially writers for children, but all writers – have an obligation to our readers: it's the obligation to write true things, especially important when we are creating tales of people who do not exist in places that never were – to understand that truth is not in what happens but what it tells us about who we are. Fiction is the lie that tells the truth, after all.

Neil Gaiman

That is why I think, in defiance of Plato, that there is at once error and vulgarity in saying that poetry is a lie, except in the sense that Cocteau wrote one day: I am a lie who always tells the truth. The only poetry which lies purely and simply is academic, pseudo-classical, conceptually repetitive poetry, and it is not poetry.

Jacques Maritain

As long as a journalist tells the truth, in conscience and fairness, it is not his job to worry about consequences. The truth is never as dangerous as a lie in the long run. I truly believe the truth sets men free.