honesty quotes

The most interesting information comes from children, for they tell all they know and then stop.

If evil be spoken of you and it be true, correct yourself, if it be a lie, laugh at it.

Truth is mighty and will prevail. There is nothing wrong with this, except that it ain’t so.

An honest man’s the noblest work of God.

Part of the inhumanity of the computer is that, once it is competently programmed and working smoothly, it is completely honest.

A letter does not blush.

It’s when you begin to lie to yourself in a poem in order to simply make a poem, that you fail.

You don’t tell deliberate lies, but sometimes you have to be evasive.

We tell lies, yet it is easy to show that lying is immoral.

We must distinguish between speaking to deceive and being silent to be reserved.

Moral authority comes from following universal and timeless principles like honesty, integrity, treating people with respect.

Better a broken promise than none at all.

All my stepchildren carried the burden of my fame. Sometimes they would read terrible things about me, and I’d worry about whether it would hurt them. I would tell them: ‚Don’t hide these things from me. I’d rather you ask me these things straight out, and I’ll answer all your questions.‘

There are many times when a woman will ask another girl friend how she likes her new hat. She will reply, ‚Fine,‘ but slap her hand to her forehead the minute the girl leaves to yipe, ‚What a horror!‘

Honesty is for the most part less profitable than dishonesty.

‚Tis not enough your counsel still be true; Blunt truths more mischief than nice falsehoods do.

There’s no point in saying anything but the truth.

An unexciting truth may be eclipsed by a thrilling lie.

One thing you gotta know about me is I have absolutely no filter. I have no problem saying what the hell I think of someone.

Lying is not only saying what isn’t true. It is also, in fact especially, saying more than is true and, in the case of the human heart, saying more than one feels. We all do it, every day, to make life simpler.

Don’t believe your friends when they ask you to be honest with them. All they really want is to be maintained in the good opinion they have of themselves.

Truth is so hard to tell, it sometimes needs fiction to make it plausible.

When a person cannot deceive himself the chances are against his being able to deceive other people.

If I’m honest I have to tell you I still read fairy-tales and I like them best of all.

To the living we owe respect, but to the dead we owe only the truth.

Never pretend to a love which you do not actually feel, for love is not ours to command.

Honesty is the best policy – when there is money in it.

Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.

Children say that people are hung sometimes for speaking the truth.

I have known a vast quantity of nonsense talked about bad men not looking you in the face. Don’t trust that conventional idea. Dishonesty will stare honesty out of countenance any day in the week, if there is anything to be got by it.

Honest disagreement is often a good sign of progress.

If the writing is honest it cannot be separated from the man who wrote it.

When you walk into my classroom, I’m going to give it to you straight, just like in the real world, because that’s the only way to prepare you for the real world.

Anyone who doesn’t take truth seriously in small matters cannot be trusted in large ones either.

Make yourself an honest man, and then you may be sure there is one less rascal in the world.

True friends stab you in the front.

For my own part, I wish the bald eagle had not been chosen the representative of our country. He is a bird of bad moral character. He does not get his living honestly.

I was gratified to be able to answer promptly, and I did. I said I didn’t know.

When I was young, an eccentric uncle decided to teach me how to lie. Not, he explained, because he wanted me to lie, but because he thought I should know how it’s done so I would recognise when I was being lied to.

How can sincerity be a condition of friendship? A taste for truth at any cost is a passion which spares nothing.

George Washington, as a boy, was ignorant of the commonest accomplishments of youth. He could not even lie.

False words are not only evil in themselves, but they infect the soul with evil.

The best measure of a man’s honesty isn’t his income tax return. It’s the zero adjust on his bathroom scale.

To conceal anything from those to whom I am attached, is not in my nature. I can never close my lips where I have opened my heart.

If you tell the truth, you don’t have to remember anything.

I was really too honest a man to be a politician and live.

I’m not claiming divinity. I’ve never claimed purity of soul. I’ve never claimed to have the answers to life. I only put out songs and answer questions as honestly as I can… But I still believe in peace, love and understanding.

I don’t like people going behind my back.

No one can lie, no one can hide anything, when he looks directly into someone’s eyes.

No one can be happy who has been thrust outside the pale of truth. And there are two ways that one can be removed from this realm: by lying, or by being lied to.

Seek not the favor of the multitude; it is seldom got by honest and lawful means. But seek the testimony of few; and number not voices, but weigh them.

Every time somebody speaks of my honesty, there is someone who quivers inside me.

When in doubt tell the truth.

I looked the people of Louisiana in the eye and told them exactly what I thought in terms that normal people use.

And whether you’re an honest man, or whether you’re a thief, depends on whose solicitor has given me my brief.

Truly it is an evil to be full of faults; but it is a still greater evil to be full of them and to be unwilling to recognize them, since that is to add the further fault of a voluntary illusion.

I can be a cruel person.

One must not cheat anyone, not even the world of its victory.

People need good lies. There are too many bad ones.

The truth is rarely pure and never simple.