I am ok.
That dress suits you well.
I love you too.
I’m on my way.
Oh, I didn’t see you.
I believe it’s reasonable to state that we all lie.
However harsh that sounds, lying is quite instinctive and commonplace. If you think ‘Nah, I don’t do it’, read again the five statements above. Yes, we all lie and we do it quite a lot.
The reasons why we lie may vary from trying to defend ourselves, avoid a conflict, impress someone, keep a secret, get social approval, or present a good image of ourselves.
And most often, we lie to protect someone’s feelings and keep them safe in a happy little bubble. And to some extent, these ‘white lies’ or small omissions may be justified. In fact, they may even benefit our relationships, as the psychological dissertation suggests.
But what about those whose lies are so constant and lack any reason, or those reasons are so destructive and rotten that they can cause you immense pain and suffering? These are the liars whose dishonesty has the potential to completely change our lives.
I’ve ventured out into the depths of the internet to collect the best quotes about liars to help you stop giving them the benefit of the doubt.
Let’s check them out!
Top 10 Quotes About Liars
1. “Lies are usually attempts to make everything simpler – for the liar – than it really is, or ought to be.” — Adrienne Rich
2. “People don’t lie to contaminate truth. They lie to pollute their hearts.” ― Munia Khan
3. “Liars are the cause of all the sins and crimes in the world.” ― Epictetus
4. “A liar begins with making falsehood appear like truth, and ends with making truth itself appear like falsehood.” — William Shenstone
5. “Direct lies, small lies, huge lies, and lies of omission… these are all self-serving and sources of self-destruction.” ― Cathy Burnham Martin
6. “The liar’s punishment is, not in the least that he is not believed, but that he cannot believe anyone else.” — George Bernard Shaw
7. “Whoever is careless with the truth in small matters cannot be trusted in important affairs.” — Albert Einstein
8. “What I know for sure is that speaking your truth is the most powerful tool we have.” — Oprah Winfrey
9. “Hope is the only universal liar who never loses his reputation for veracity.” — Robert Green Ingersoll
10. “You may tell the greatest lies and wear a brilliant disguise, but you can’t escape the eyes of the one who sees right through you.” — Tom Robbins
See also: 80 When Someone Is Lying And You Know The Truth Quotes
Dealing With Liars Quotes
1. “All liars … lie to protect themselves, to shield their egos from the raw pain of truth.” ― Aminatta Forna
2. “I don’t degrade anyone, but a liar and a person who doesn’t keep his or her words, has not any value in my eyes.” ― Ehsan Sehgal
3. “Hate a liar more than I hate thief. A thief is only after my salary a liar is after my reality.” — Curtis Jackson
4. “He who tells a lie is not sensible how great a task he undertakes; for he must be forced to invent twenty more to maintain that one.” — Alexander Pope
5. “I don’t hate liars. I just disrespect them, because they disrespect themselves in the first place.” ― Revaz Eristavi
6. “Once a country is habituated to liars, it takes generations to get the truth back.” ― Gore Vidal
7. “Hypocrites get offended by the truth.” ― Jess C. Scott
8. “A liar is a liar and lives on the lies he tells and dies in a life of lies.” — Carl Sandburg
9. “Of course, the liar often imagines that he does no harm as long as his lies go undetected.” — Sam Harris
10. “I’m not upset that you lied to me, I’m upset that from now on I can’t believe you.” — Friedrich Nietzsche
11. “The rules are simple: they lie to us, we know they’re lying, they know we know they’re lying, but they keep lying to us, and we keep pretending to believe them.” — Elena Gorokhova
12. “In a scene where nobody with any ambition is really what he appears to be, there’s not much risk in acting like a king-hell freak.” — Hunter S. Thompson
13. “He, of course, is a liar, but that doesn’t really matter because, if you know liars are liars, it comes to the same thing.” ― Agatha Christie
14. “Hard truths can be dealt with, triumphed over, but lies will destroy your soul.” — Patricia Briggs
15. “Liar is the one who pretends to be very good or the one who pretends to be very bad.” ― Evan Esar
16. “Conquer a liar with truth.” — Gautama Buddha
17. “A good lie finds more believers than a bad truth.” — John Laurie
18. “You do not need to defeat a liar, a liar’s lie is itself his or her defeat.” ― Ehsan Sehgal
19. “To a liar, the most dangerous individual is the person who catches lies but doesn’t say anything about it. Then the liar isn’t sure which lies are compromised.” — Jesse Ball
20. “The best liar is he who makes the smallest amount of lying go the longest way.” ― Samuel Butler
21. “Lying is done with words, and also with silence.” — Adrienne Rich
22. “Some people sometimes kiss and tell; some sometimes tell without having kissed.” ― Mokokoma Mokhonoana
23. “The liar wants to be believed, but lying undermines the foundation for credibility.” — Randal Marlin
24. “A persistent liar cannot prosper without a powerful memory.” ― Amit Kalantri
25. “A liar often smiles subtly while telling a lie. It’s an unconscious expression of his delight in getting away with a whopper.” — Pamela Meyer
26. “Liars often set their own traps.” ― Aesop
27. “Half of the people lie with their lips; the other half with their tears.” ― Nassim Nicholas Taleb
28. “Today, you cannot be too careful when it comes to determining who is friend or foe, who is honest or who is a liar.” — Lillian Glass
29. “A pathological liar can always be expected to tell you where the truth lies.” ― Evan Esar
30. “The only thing worse than a liar is a liar that’s also a hypocrite!” ― Tennessee Williams
See also: 100 Best Quotes About Hypocrites To Know If You Are One
Wise Quotes On Liars
1. “Every violation of truth is not only a sort of suicide in the liar but is a stab at the health of human society.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson
2. “In politics, you learn how to say A mean to say B, in wisdom you learn how to say A and keep saying that.” ― Auliq Ice
3. “But he that sows lie in the end shall not lack a harvest, and soon he may rest from toil indeed, while others reap and sow in his stead.” ― J.R.R. Tolkien
4. “The ability to lie, paired with unaccountability, has made a near infinite amount of liabilities.” ― Justin K. McFarlane
5. “A good liar knows that the most efficient lie is always a truth that has had a key piece removed from it.” — Carlos Ruiz Zafon
6. “Anybody who says they are a good liar obviously is not, because any legitimately savvy liar would always insist they’re honest about everything.” ― Chuck Klosterman
7. “To know the good from the bad, study a man or woman’s history of actions, not their record of intentions.” ― Suzy Kassem
8. “It takes a liar to know a liar.” ― Sanders Sides
9. “You can’t always expect people to apply your wisdom when they didn’t use wisdom before they found themselves knee deep in their version of justice.” ― Shannon L. Alder
10. “Silence the angry man with love. Silence the ill-natured man with kindness. Silence the miser with generosity. Silence the liar with truth.” — Gautama Buddha
11. “If you tell the truth, you don’t have to remember anything.” — Mark Twain
12. “Only fools and liars claim to know everything because the fool thinks all that he knows is everything and the liar knows there is no sufficient data to know everything” ― Nyona Matende
13. “Adding more bull to bull yields bigger bull.” ― Cathy Burnham Martin
14. “The biggest liar in the world is +’They Say’.” ― Douglas Malloch
15. “He who does not bellow the truth when he knows the truth makes himself the accomplice of liars and forgers.” — Charles Peguy
16. “The one who most seems like a liar is the one who tells a bold-face truth.” ― Runa Pigden
17. “Lies only strengthen our defects. They don’t teach anything, help anything, fix anything, or cure anything. Nor do they develop one’s character, one’s mind, one’s heart or one’s soul.” ― José N. Harris
18. “The slickest way in the world to lie is to tell the right amount of truth at the right time and then shut up.” — Robert A. Heinlein
19. “A lie is like a snowball; it starts off small and then grows and grows until a point where it gets so big it falls apart and then the truth is discovered.” — Chris Hughes
20. “The problem with being a liar is you can never believe anyone else.” ― Chloe Thurlow
21. “No one is such a liar as the indignant man.” — Friedrich Nietzsche
22. “When you’re a liar, a person of low moral fortitude, really any explanation you need to be true can be true. Especially if you’re smart enough. You can figure out a way to justify anything.” — Samuel Witwer
23. “The best liars lie with their eyes rather than with their words.” — Joanna Scott
24. “If you look up “charming” in the dictionary, you’ll see that it not only has references to strong attraction but to spells and magic. Then again, what are liars if not great magicians?” ― Deb Caletti
25. “A man is never more truthful than when he acknowledges himself a liar.” — Mark Twain
26. “Three things cannot be long hidden: the sun, the moon, and the truth.” — Buddha
27. “A lie cannot live.” — Martin Luther King, Jr.
28. “If falsehood, like truth, had but one face, we would be more on equal terms. For we would consider the contrary of what the liar said to be certain. But the opposite of truth has a hundred thousand faces and an infinite field.” — Michel de Montaigne
29. “The poet is a liar who always speaks the truth.” — Jean Cocteau
30. “A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on.” — Winston Churchill
Liars Quotes For Self-Protection
1. “When your ears hear one thing, but your eyes see another…use your brain.” ― Frank Sonnenberg
2. “People wear a mask of a lie, so they look attractive, so be careful.” ― Muhammad Saqib
3. “The way to happiness is by the truth. Seek to be true in all things and you will have a foundation to build your future.” ― Shannon L. Alder
4. “If you don’t want to slip up tomorrow, speak the truth today.” — Bruce Lee
5. “Be careful… not all are what they seem. Some people pretend to be the beach, but they’re actually quicksand.” ― Steve Maraboli
6. “He who permits himself to tell a lie once finds it much easier to do it the second time.” — Thomas Jefferson
7. “Corrupt men are always liars. Lies are their instruments, their pleasure, their solace. In time they come to believe their lies, or rather to half-believe them.” — Robert Payne
8. “You can best reward a liar by believing nothing of what he says.” ― Aristippus
9. “To assent to obvious lies is to co-operate with evil, and in some small way to become evil oneself. One’s standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control.” — Theodore Dalrymple
10. “Take back your power! I wish you the wisdom to realize that the problem isn’t that they keep lying to you; it’s that you keep believing them.” ― Steve Maraboli
11. “Those who think it is permissible to tell white lies soon grow color-blind.” — Austin O’Malley
12. “Sometimes it is easier to see clearly into the liar than into the man who tells the truth. Truth, like light, blinds. Falsehood, on the contrary, is a beautiful twilight that enhances every object.” — Albert Camus
13. “Liars are always most disposed to swear.” — Vittorio Alfieri
14. “Some people think that the truth can be hidden with a little cover-up and decoration. But as time goes by, what is true is revealed, and what is fake fades away.” — Ismail Haniyeh
15. “There are no ‘perfect liars’ in the world; there are only ‘perfect believers’ who believe in even the most obvious lies!” — Mehmet Murat Ildan
16. “Truth is as straight as an arrow, while a lie swivels like a snake.” ― Suzy Kassem
17. “Never chase a lie. Let it alone, and it will run itself to death.” — Lyman Beecher
18. “Karma records every single word and action of ours. There is no truth without truthfulness. For, even worse than speaking a lie is to live it.” — Unknown
19. “Lying is a hateful and accursed vice. We have no other tie upon one another, but our word. If we did but discover the horror and consequences of it, we should pursue it with fire and sword, and more justly than other crimes.” — Michel de Montaigne
20. “Sometimes the point isn’t to make people believe a lie — it’s to make people fear the liar.” — Anne Applebaum
21. “Choose your leaders with wisdom and forethought. To be led by a coward is to be controlled by all that the coward fears. To be led by a fool is to be led by the opportunists who control the fool. To be led by a thief is to offer up your most precious treasures to be stolen. To be led by a liar is to ask to be told lies.” — Octavia Butler
22. “Figures don’t lie, but liars figure.” — Mark Twain
23. “Some of the most frantic lies on the face of life are told with modesty and restraint; for the simple reason that only modesty and restraint will save them.” — G.K. Chesterton
24. “He who permits himself to tell a lie once finds it much easier to do it a second and third time, till at length it becomes habitual; he tells lies without attending to it, and truths without the world’s believing him. This falsehood of the tongue leads to that of the heart, and in time depraves all its good dispositions.” — Thomas Jefferson
25. “The most confused we ever get is when we’re trying to convince our heads of something our heart knows is a lie.” — Karen Marie Moning
26. “One can be absolutely truthful and sincere even though admittedly the most outrageous liar. Fiction and invention are of the very fabric of life.” — Henry Miller
27. “In all ages, the people have honored those who dishonored them. They have worshiped their destroyers; they have canonized the most gigantic liars and buried the great thieves in marble and gold. Under the loftiest monuments sleeps the dust of murder.” — Robert Green Ingersoll
28. “When the truth is replaced by silence, the silence is a lie.” — Yevgeny Yevtushenko
29. “Do not consider it proof just because it is written in books, for a liar who will deceive with his tongue will not hesitate to do the same with his pen.” — Maimonides
30. “Honesty is of God and dishonesty of the devil; the devil was a liar from the beginning.” — Joseph B. Wirthlin
See also: 220 Awesome Devil Quotes For Instagram + Devil Captions
Life Quotes About Liars
1. “The world is not fair, and often fools, cowards, liars, and the selfish hide in high places.” — Bryant H. McGill
2. “One lie has the power to tarnish a thousand truths.” ― Al David
3. “Lies sound like facts to those who’ve been conditioned to misrecognize the truth.” ― DaShanne Stokes
4. “People lie, cheat, and bully one another and then wonder why they’re unhappy.” ― Marty Rubin
5. “When your lover is a liar, you and he have a lot in common, you’re both lying to you!” ― Susan Forward
6. “Some people are in such utter darkness that they will burn you just to see a light. Try not to take it personally.” ― Kamand Kojouri
7. “Sometimes your mind and your heart want different things, and you know your heart is a liar.” ― Surya Raj
8. “When people don’t tell you the truth what they really are saying is they don’t value you or their relationship with you enough, to be honest.” ― Shannon L. Alder
9. “Lying is an indispensable part of making life tolerable.” — Bergen Evans
10. “Once you place that crown of a liar on your head, you can take it off again, but it leaves a stain for all time.” — Terry Goodkind
11. “No one believes a liar. Even when she’s telling the truth.” ― Sara Shepard
12. “Lies don’t end relationships, the truth does.” ― Shannon L. Alder
13. “The fact that so many successful politicians are such shameless liars is not only a reflection on them, it is also a reflection on us. When the people want the impossible, only liars can satisfy.” — Thomas Sowell
14. “The trust of the innocent is the liar’s most useful tool.” — Stephen King
15. “Unfortunately, in today’s world a liar seems to be more reliable than a truthful, honest man.” ― Munia Khan
16. “Screaming and repeating lies makes them neither true nor more believable.” ― Cathy Burnham Martin
17. “When a man is penalized for honesty he learns to lie.” — Criss Jami
18. “A liar will not be believed, even when he speaks the truth.” — Aesop
19. “Neither a fake friend nor a liar can be trusted, with a secret.” ― Ellen J. Barrier
20. “A storyteller makes up things to help other people; a liar makes up things to help himself.” — Daniel Wallace
21. “The American people are tired of liars and people who pretend to be something they’re not.” ― Hillary Clinton
22. “Denial can be beautiful. But only when you’re a fantastic liar.” ― Kim Holden
23. “Liars share with those they deceive the desire not to be deceived.” — Sissela Bok
24. “If you tell a big enough lie and tell it frequently enough, it will be believed.” — Adolf Hitler
25. “Things come apart so easily when they have been held together with lies.” — Dorothy Allison
26. “Lying to ourselves is more deeply ingrained than lying to others.” — Fyodor Dostoevsky
27. “Old liars hold lies.” ― Toba Beta
28. “Liars need to have good memories.” — Algernon Sidney
29. “The visionary lies to himself; the liar only to others.” ― Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
30. “Liars are highly unlikely to admit their lies, never mind apologize for the hurt they’ve caused. Liars don’t genuinely apologize.” — Cathy Burnham Martin
Lies And Deceit Quotes
1. “Lies are like cockroaches, for every one you discover there are many more that are hidden.” ― Gary Hopkins
2. “Even a tiny bit of deceit is dishonorable when it’s used for selfish or cowardly reasons.” — Jeanne Birdsall
3. “There is tremendous trauma in the betrayal caused by a perpetual liar as they repeatedly commit psychological abuse.” ― Cathy Burnham Martin
4. “When you don’t have honesty in love then there is no communication. Honesty is the improvisation of the heart; anything less is a well thought out and rehearsed the script.” ― Shannon L. Alder
5. “Nothing is more deceitful…than the appearance of humility. It is often only carelessness of opinion, and sometimes an indirect boast.” — Jane Austen
6. “Accepting fraud from our leaders means accepting fraud in our personal lives.” ― DaShanne Stokes
7. “I do really believe that, like so many liars, there is a real substratum of truth behind her lies.” ― Agatha Christie
8. “The trouble with lying and deceiving is that their efficiency depends entirely upon a clear notion of the truth that the liar and deceiver wishes to hide.” — Hannah Arendt
9. “It is an unconscious liar that is the greatest liar.” ― Samuel Butler
10. “The truly scary thing about undiscovered lies is that they have a greater capacity to diminish us than exposed ones.” — Cheryl Hughes
11. “The essence of lying is in deception, not in words.” — John Ruskin
12. “Thieves and liars kill indirectly, unintentionally, and with no other weapon than their tongues and malice.” ― A.E.H. Veenman
13. “If it is necessary sometimes to lie to others, it is always despicable to lie to oneself.” — W. Somerset Maugham
14. “The mistake ninety-nine percent of humanity made, as far as facts could see, was being ashamed of what they were; lying about it, trying to be somebody else.” — J.K. Rowling
15. “A liar’s worst misfortune is not that no one believes him, but that he can’t believe anyone else.” ― Evan Esar
16. “Men are liars. We’ll lie about lying if we have to. I’m an algebra liar. I figure two good lies make a positive.” — Tim Allen
17. “To a liar, truth is more a stranger than fiction.” — Evan Esar
18. “When people cheat in any arena, they diminish themselves — they threaten their own self-esteem and their relationships with others by undermining the trust they have in their ability to succeed and in their ability to be true.” — Cheryl Hughes
19. “No man has a good enough memory to make a successful liar.” — Abraham Lincoln
20. “A liar deceives himself more than anyone, for he believes he can remain a person of good character when he cannot.” ― Richelle E. Goodrich
21. “Liars seldom believe anyone else.” — James Cook
22. “Be bad, but at least don’t be a liar, a deceiver!” ― Leo Tolstoy
23. “There is no evil that cannot be done by the liar, who has transgressed the one law of truthfulness and who is indifferent to the world beyond.” — Buddah
24. “Of all the liars in the world, sometimes the worst are your own fears.” — Rudyard Kipling
25. “People always overdo the matter when they attempt deception.” — Charles Dudley Warner
26. “There was a distinction between lying and telling half-truths, but it was a very narrow one.” — Alexander McCall Smith
27. “Liars, when they speak the truth, are not believed.” ― Aristotle
28. “Some liars are so expert they deceive themselves.” — Austin O’Malley
29. “Anything’s better than lying and deceit.” — Leo Tolstoy
30. “A hero must be honorable, must have honor. And you can’t have honor if you’re a liar. There is no honor in lying.” ― Jesse Ventura
Summing Up
I believe this collection of quotes about liars has helped you realize that there is nothing worthy about being a liar and I hope you have chosen to not be one of these people.
