H. G. Wells Lying Quotations

Heresies are experiments in man's unsatisfied search for truth.

Advertising is legalized lying.

The true strength of rulers and empires lies not in armies or emotions, but in the belief of men that they are inflexibly open and truthful and legal. As soon as a government departs from that standard it ceases to be anything more than 'the gang in possession,' and its days are numbered.

There was a time when I believed in the story and the scheme of salvation, so far as I could understand it, just as I believed there was a Devil... Suddenly the light broke through to me and I knew this God was a lie... For indeed it is a silly story, and each generation nowadays swallows it with greater difficulty... Why do people go on pretending about this Christianity?

I believe that now and always the conscious selection of the best for reproduction will be impossible; that to propose it is to display a fundamental misunderstanding of what individuality implies. The way of nature has always been to slay the hindmost, and there is still no other way, unless we can prevent those who would become the hindmost being born. It is in the sterilization of failure, and not in the selection of successes for breeding, that the possibility of an improvement of the human stock lies.

Lies are the mortar that binds the savage individual man into the social masonry.

Dragging out life to the last possible second is not living to the best effect. The nearer the bone, the sweeter the meat. The best of life, Passworthy, lies nearest to the edge of death.

The Social Contract is nothing more or less than a vast conspiracy of human beings to lie to and humbug themselves for the general Good. Lies are the mortar that bind the savage individual man into the social masonry.

I am prepared to maintain that Honesty is essentially an anarchistic and disintegrating force in society, that communities are held together and the progress of civilization made possible only by vigorous and sometimes even, violent Lying; that the Social Contract is nothing more or less than a vast conspiracy of human beings to lie and humbug themselves and one another for the general Good.

I don't think you fully appreciate the importance of Illusion in life, the Essential Nature of Lies and Deception of the body politic.

A world revolution to a higher social order, a world order, or utter downfall lies before us all.

An animal may be ferocious and cunning enough, but it takes a real man to tell a lie.

No. I cannot expect you to believe it. Take it as a lie--or a prophecy. Say I dreamed it in the workshop. Consider I have been speculating upon the destinies of our race until I have hatched this fiction. Treat my assertion of its truth as a mere stroke of art to enhance its interest. And taking it as a story, what do you think of it?