"Lying" by Sam Harris

• Among the many paradoxes of human life, this is perhaps the most peculiar and consequential: We often behave in ways that are guaranteed to make us unhappy.
• Lying is the royal road to chaos.
• The boundary between lying and deception is often vague. In fact, it is even possible to deceive with the truth.
• To lie is to intentionally mislead others when they expect honest communication.
• People lie so that others will form beliefs that are not true.
• To speak truthfully is to accurately represent one’s beliefs.
• The intent to communicate honestly is the measure of truthfulness.
• The moment we consider our dishonesty from the point of few of those we lie to, we recognize that we could feel betrayed if the roles were reversed.
• Research suggests that all forms of lying--including white lies meant to spare the feelings of others--are associated with poorer quality relationships.
• Once one commits to telling the truth, one begins to notice how unusually it is to meet someone who shares this commitment. Honest people are a refuge: You know they mean what they say; you know they will not say one thing to your face and another behind your back; you know they will tell you when they think you have failed--and for this reason their praise cannot be mistaken for mere flattery.
• Honesty is a gift we can give to others. It is also a source of power and an engine of simplicity. Knowing that we will attempt to tell the truth, whatever the circumstances, leaves us with little to prepare for. We can simply be ourselves.
• In committing to be honest with everyone, we commit to avoiding a wide range of long-term problems, but at the cost of occasional, short-term discomfort.
• A commitment to telling the truth requires that one pay attention to what the truth is in every moment
• Lying is the lifeblood of addiction. Without recourse to lies, our lives can unravel only so far without others’ noticing.
• Telling the truth can also reveal ways in which we want to grow, but haven’t
• Ethical transgressions are generally divided into two categories: the bad things we do (acts of commission) and the good things we fail to do (acts of omission). We tend to judge the former far more harshly.
• Doing something requires energy, and most morally salient actions require conscious intent. A failure to do something can arise purely by circumstance and requires energy to rectify. The difference is important.
• Sincerity, authenticity, integrity, mutual understanding--these and other sources of moral wealth are destroyed the moment we deliberately misrepresent our beliefs, whether or not our lies are ever discovered.
• By lying, we deny our friends access to reality--and their resulting ignorance often harms them in ways we did not anticipate.
• There are many circumstances in life in which false encouragement can be very costly to another person.
• False encouragement is a kind of theft: it steals time, energy, and motivation a person could put toward some other purpose.
• If the truth itself is painful to tell, there are often background truths that are not--and these can be communicated as well, deepening the friendship.
• 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.
• Unless someone is suicidal or otherwise on the brink, deciding how much he can know about himself seems the quintessence of arrogance.
• When we pretend not to know the truth, we must also pretend not to be motivated by it. This can force us to make choices that we would not otherwise make.
• Failures of personal integrity, once revealed, are rarely forgotten.
• A wasteland of embarrassment and social upheaval can be neatly avoided by following a single precept in life: Do not lie.
• Saving our friends disappointment and embarrassment is a great kindness. And if we have a history of being honest, our praise and encouragement will actually mean something.
• A commitment to honesty does not necessarily require that we disclose facts about ourselves that we would prefer to keep private.
• So there is no conflict, in principle, between honesty and the keeping of secrets.
• To agree to keep a secret is to assume a burden. At a minimum, one must remember what one is not supposed to talk about. This can be difficult and lead to clumsy attempts at deception.
• A total prohibition against lying is also ethically incoherent in anyone but a true pacifist.
• Even as a means to ward off violence, lying often closes the door to acts of honest communication that may be more effective.
• 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.
• I continue to find that a willingness to be honest--especially about truths that one might be expected to conceal--often leads to much more gratifying exchanges with other human beings.
• This is among the many corrosive effects of having unjust laws: They tempt peaceful and (otherwise) honest people to lie to as to avoid being punished for behavior that is ethically blameless.
• One of the greatest problems for the liar is that he must keep track of his lies.
• There is no question that lying comes at a psychological cost for the rest of us.
• Lies beget other lies. Unlike statements of fact, which require no further work on our part, lies must be continually protected from collisions with reality.
• When you tell the truth, you have nothing to keep track of.
• Tell enough lies, however, and the effort required to keep your audience in the dark quickly becomes unsustainable.
• In fact, suspicion often grows on both sides of a lie: Research indicates that liars trust those they deceive less than they otherwise might--and the more damaging their lies, the less they trust, or even like, their victims.
• To truly have integrity, we must not feel the need to lie about our personal lives.
• To lie is to erect a boundary between the truth we are living and the perception others have of us.
• Many lives are almost scandal-proof. Vulnerability comes in pretending to be someone you are not.
• Lying has precipitated or prolonged wars: The Gulf of Tonkin incident in Vietnam and false reports of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq were both instances in which lying (at some level) led to armed conflict that might otherwise not have occurred.
• Our public discourse appears permanently riven by conspiracy theories.
• An unhappy truth of human psychology is probably also a t work here, which makes it hard to abolish lies once they have escaped into the world: We seem to be predisposed to remember statements as true even after they have been disconfirmed.
• The moment one begins dropping bombs, or destroying a country’s infrastructure with cyber attacks, lying has become just another weapon in the arsenal.
• Most forms of private vice and public evil are kindled and sustained by lies.
• Every lie is a direct assault upon the autonomy of those we lie to.
• Lies are the social equivalent of toxic waste--everyone is potentially harmed by their spread.
• There is no question that we can be blind to facts about ourselves or about the world that we really should see--but truly believing one’s own falsehoods is tantamount to honesty.
• Negative injunctions are actions we should avoid; positive injunctions are actions we should perform.
• Another important difference between negative and positive injunctions is that it is quite clear when one has fulfilled the former, whereas the latter are often beset by ambiguities.
• 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.