Lying

endless forms of suffering and embarrassment could be easily avoided by simply telling the truth.

I came away convinced that lying, even about the smallest matters, needlessly damages personal relationships and public trust.

To not lie is a negative injunction, and it takes no energy to accomplish. To tell the whole truth, however, is a positive injunction—requiring an endless effort at communication.

this way, every lie haunts our future. There is no telling when or how it might collide with reality, requiring further maintenance.

Lying is, almost by definition, a refusal to cooperate with others. It condenses a lack of trust and trustworthiness into a single act. It is both a failure of understanding and an unwillingness to be understood. To lie is to recoil from relationship.

Unlike statements of fact, which require no further work on our part, lies must be continually protected from collisions with reality.

In those circumstances where we deem it obviously necessary to lie, we have generally determined that the person to be deceived is both dangerous and unreachable by any recourse to the truth. In other words, we have judged the prospects of establishing a real relationship with this person to be nonexistent. For most of us, such circumstances arise very rarely in life, if ever.

There is comedy here, of course—but only for others.

When we presume to lie for the benefit of others, we have decided that we are the best judges of how much they should understand about their own lives—about how they appear, their reputations, or their prospects in the world.

By lying, we deny our friends access to reality—and their resulting ignorance often harms them in ways we did not anticipate.