LYING by Sam Harris, Annaka 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.
• Deception can take many forms, but not all acts of deception are lies. Even the most ethical among us regularly struggle to keep appearances and reality apart.
• The boundary between lying and deception is often vague. 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. The more consequential the beliefs—that is, the more a person’s well-being demands a correct understanding of the world or of other people’s opinions—the more consequential the lie.
• To speak truthfully is to accurately represent one’s beliefs. But candor offers no assurance that one’s beliefs about the world are true.
• The intent to communicate honestly is the measure of truthfulness.
• Many of us lie to our friends and family members to spare their feelings.
• The liar often imagines that he does no harm so long as his lies go undetected. But the one lied to rarely shares this view. The moment we consider our dishonesty from the perspective of those we lie to, we recognize that we would feel betrayed if the roles were reversed.
• The opportunity to deceive others is ever present and often tempting, and each instance of deception casts us onto some of the steepest ethical terrain we ever cross.
• At least one study suggests that 10 percent of communication between spouses is deceptive.
• Lying is ubiquitous, and yet even liars rate their deceptive interactions as less pleasant than truthful ones.
• Once one commits to telling the truth, one begins to notice how unusual 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. Knowing that we told the truth in the past leaves us with nothing to keep track of. We can simply be ourselves in every moment.
• In committing to being honest with everyone, we commit to avoiding a wide range of long-term problems, but at the cost of occasional short-term discomfort.
• Lying is the lifeblood of addiction. If we have no 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 are associated with conscious intent.
• Failing to do something can arise purely by circumstance and requires energy to rectify.
• 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 reality9—and their resulting ignorance often harms them in ways we did not anticipate.
• False encouragement is a kind of theft: It steals time, energy, and motivation that a person could put toward some other purpose.
• 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.
• When we pretend not to know the truth, we must also pretend not to be motivated by it.
• The opportunity to say something useful to the people we love soon disappears, never to return.
• Failures of personal integrity, once revealed, are rarely forgotten.
• Yes, it can be unpleasant to be told that we have wasted time, or that we are not performing as well as we imagined, but if the criticism is valid, it is precisely what we most need to hear to find our way in the world.
• Sparing others 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.
• 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.
• Nevertheless, I still find that a willingness to be honest—especially about things that one might be expected to conceal—often leads to much more gratifying exchanges with other human beings.
• One of the worst things about breaking the law is that it puts you at odds with an indeterminate number of other people. This is among the many corrosive effects of unjust laws: They tempt peaceful and (otherwise) honest people to lie so 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.
• Psychopaths can assume the burden of mental accounting without any obvious distress. That is no accident: They are psychopaths.
• Lies beget other lies.
• When you tell the truth, you have nothing to keep track of. The world itself becomes your memory, and if questions arise, you can always point others back to it.
• A commitment to the truth is naturally purifying of error.
• Integrity consists of many things, but it generally requires us to avoid behavior that readily leads to shame or remorse.
• To lie is to erect a boundary between the truth we are living and the perception others have of us.
• It is simply astonishing how people destroy their marriages, careers, and reputations by saying one thing and doing another.
• Vulnerability comes in pretending to be someone you are not.
• Big lies have led many people to reflexively distrust those in positions of authority.
• We seem to be predisposed to remember statements as true even after they have been disconfirmed.
• The need for state secrets is obvious. However, the need for governments to lie to their own people seems to me to be virtually nonexistent.
• I suspect that the telling of necessary lies will be rare for anyone but a spy—assuming we grant that espionage is ethically defensible in today’s world.
• The ethics of war and espionage are the ethics of emergency—and are, therefore, necessarily limited in scope.
• Most forms of private vice and public evil are kindled and sustained by lies.
• Lying is, almost by definition, a refusal to cooperate with others.
• Lies are the social equivalent of toxic waste: Everyone is potentially harmed by their spread.
• Ultimately, we all die, and the only question is, what have you done between the time you’re born and the time you die?