If you tell the truth you don't have to remember anything. Mark TwainSome of the more recent quotes carry a harder edge to them.
Those who think it is permissible to tell white lies soon grow color-blind. Austin O'Malley
Honesty is the first chapter of the book of wisdom. Thomas Jefferson
To be persuasive we must be believable; to be believable we must be credible; credible we must be truthful. Edward R. Murrow
Honest hearts produce honest actions. Brigham Young
Honesty has come to mean the privilege of insulting you to your face without expecting redress. Judith MartinBut the one that seems most telling to me is one from someone of whom I've never heard:
People who are brutally honest get more satisfaction out of the brutality than out of the honesty. Richard J. Needham
The most dangerous untruths are truths moderately distorted. Georg Christoph LichtenbergWhat is honesty? It is typically understood this way: Freedom from deceit or fraud; truthfulness. Face it. We know what honesty is ... and we all fall short. But I got to wondering the other day -- What would it be like in this world if honesty was mandatory, if we could not lie? I enjoyed, for instance, the movie, Liar, Liar in which the main character, a divorce lawyer of all things, could not lie. The results were hilarious ... and telling.
Call a help line and you might get a message like this: "Your call is important to us." Of course, that's simply a prelude to an hour of Muzak while you wait for someone to take your oh-so-important call. But in a world of mandatory honesty, it would be more like, "Please hold. Remember that we provide this help line as a mandatory service to try to keep our customers and, in all honesty, it's a lot more trouble than it's worth most of the time. Expect a lengthy delay and understand that the person who finally answers probably doesn't really know or care what you need, so please be patient."
How about those emails you get from Nigeria? "Dear sir or madam, I am a scam artist posing as a relative of a non-existent person who has died and left a lot of money that I need your help to acquire. I will try to convince you that you can help me in getting that money by offering you some of it in exchange for providing me with your bank account number. I will, of course, proceed to steal you blind, but you will think that I'm trying to give you a whole lot of money and your greed impulses should overcome your rational brain and we'll do business -- me taking what you have. If you're interested, please send me ..."
And, oh, it's frankly nearly impossible to imagine what a political campaign ad, let alone speech, would look like. "Vote for Mike! He will go to Washington to represent himself in the best possible manner! He'll pretend to care about what you want, but he'll be more interested in the power he can acquire, the fame he can mass, and, of course, the side money he can make from lobbyists and special interest groups. Trust him! He'll do his best to pander just enough to your concerns to get voted in and stay voted in. He probably won't be any more dishonest that any other politician -- probably. Yeah, yeah, we know, lousy set of choices, but vote for Mike because he's up there among the best of those really lousy options!" Political speeches would be worse. We'd have to, of course, eliminate the phrase "I promise" entirely. We'd learn to recognize that the politician that voices agreement with our own views is either too naïve or too stupid to be in office. It's not that they would be dishonest, but an honest evaluation would recognize that agreement with our own views will have little to do with what happens politics.
Okay, perhaps I'm being too cynical. Maybe I'm just a bit too biased in one direction. I do find it odd that, while on one hand we can easily see and agree that honesty is indeed the best policy, we seem to be quite incapable of either recognizing it or providing it fully and consistently ourselves. That doesn't bode well for us, does it?
3 comments:
I wonder if today was a bad day for a post on honesty?
There's never a bad day to speak out about good values.
I think the problem is not that we don't recognize honesty or the lack of it, but that we proceed despite or in spite of it in either case. Sometimes it means that we recognize the lie, so we proceed knowing so even if we're not quite honest in letting on that we do. The lie itself may simply not be worth the effort or risk of loss to waste time demanding the truth, especially if we already know what the truth is.
Worse is when we lie to ourselves. By this I don't mean the weirdo who thinks he's lying to himself by living as a man when he knows deep down that he is a woman "trapped in a man's body". No, that's just mental illness.
But when we tell ourselves that we'll accomplish something knowing full well that we will simply lie about doing nothing, or if we tell ourselves we're good, when we consistently do bad... We know fully well what the truth is about ourselves, but refuse to admit it because of what the truth means.
Many people lie about right and wrong because doing right can be difficult and a never-ending conscious decision. Very taxing to always do good. If we can pretend something wrong we want to do is right and good, then that's one less struggle, exept for the struggle of convincing one's self of the deception. As suggested by the first Mark Twain quote, being honest is just less work.
So many reasons to lie! :)
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