Quotes / Consummate Liar

Fiction

"Well, Mr. Niles, I've been thirty-eight years on the force. I've been a cop on the beat. I've been with the safe and loft squad. I've been for twenty-two years with the homicide squad. But in a lifetime of interrogating and investigating, you are probably the biggest and most willing liar I ever met."

— Lt. Dan Muldoon, The Naked City

"Golden words he will pour in your ear
But his lies can't disguise what you fear"

— Shirley Bassey, theme to Goldfinger

"In thy foul throat thou liest."

— Lady Anne, Richard III

"Have I lied to you? I mean in this room?"

—GLaDOS, Portal

"I lied. That's what I do."

— Benjamin Linus, Lost

Deep Throat: I'm the liar. You're the killer.
Cigarette-Smoking Man: Your lies have killed more in a day than I have in a lifetime.

— The X-Files, "Musings of a Cigarette-Smoking Man"

"Sicilians are great liars; the best in the world. I'm Sicilian. My father was the world heavy-weight champion of Sicilian liars. From growing up with him, I learned the pantomime. There are seventeen different things a guy can do when he lies to give himself away. A guy's got seventeen pantomimes. (A woman's got twenty, a guy's got seventeen, but...) If you know them, like you know your own face, they beat lie detectors all to hell."

— Vincenzo Cocotti, True Romance

"When dealing with a pathological liar, don't go looking for signs of a guilty conscience. True deceivers enjoy the lie. They know to look you dead in the eye and usually shed a few tears on demand. So if you want to know when they're lying, look for the little smile when deceiving a room full of people."

— Michael Westen, Burn Notice, "Partners in Crime"

Zack: Is your name Walter Burke?
Walter Burke: No.
Polygraph Interrogator: [troubled] True.

— The Recruit

Evelyn: You lied to me!
Jonathan: I lie to everybody. What makes you so special?
Evelyn: I'm your sister!
Jonathan: Well, that just makes you more gullible.

— The Mummy (1999)

"I'm the most terrific liar you ever saw in your life. It's awful. If I'm on my way to the store to buy a magazine, even, and somebody asks me where I'm going, I'm liable to say I'm going to the opera. It's terrible."

— Holden Caufield, The Catcher in the Rye

Toph: And stick to the truth. I'll be able to tell if you're lying.
Azula: Are you sure? I'm a pretty good liar. I am a four-hundred-foot-tall purple platypus bear with pink horns and silver wings.
[Beat]
Toph: ...Okay, you're good. I admit it.

— Avatar: The Last Airbender, "The Day of Black Sun, Part 2: The Eclipse"

"One lie after another. You make it look easy."

— Ryuk to Light Yagami, Death Note

"Tell me Light, from the moment you were born, has there actually been a point in your life where you've actually told the truth?"

— L to Light Yagami, Death Note

"Truth, Doctor, is in the eye of the beholder. I never tell the truth because I don't believe there is such a thing. That's why I prefer the straight-line simplicity of cutting cloth."

— Elim Garak, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, "Cardassians"

Dr. Julian Bashir: Out of all the stories you told me, which ones were true and which ones weren't?
Elim Garak: My dear Doctor, they're all true.
Dr. Julian Bashir: Even the lies?
Elim Garak: Especially the lies.

— Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, "The Wire"

"The truth is usually just an excuse for a lack of imagination."

— Elim Garak, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, "Improbable Cause"

[Julian has just told Garak the tale of "The Boy Who Cried Wolf"]
Dr. Julian Bashir: But the point is, if you lie all the time, nobody's going to believe you, even when you're telling the truth.
Elim Garak: Are you sure that's the point, doctor?
Dr. Julian Bashir: Of course. What else could it be?
Elim Garak: That you should never tell the same lie twice...

— Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, "Improbable Cause"

Psycho Mantis: But it's all about the little details! I mean, you must spend every day pretending to act like you're falsely letting on that you aren't not unbetraying someone you don't not purport to allegedly work for but really do! How do you keep all this shit straight without having an aneurysm?
Revolver Ocelot: [shrugs] Practice.

— The Last Days of FOXHOUND

"Those who are foolish enough to believe that they might come to understand the motivations and plans of this most deceptive god must surely be deluded, for Tzeentch is the Father of Lies and Deception, the Master of Fortune and the Architect of Fate. Truth and lies spill from His consciousness like the incoming tide of a treacherous sea. Tzeentch cannot be trusted even to the degree that the other gods of Chaos can be — a sobering realization indeed, considering the fickle nature of His brother daemon-gods."

— Warhammer: Liber Chaotica

"The Daemon lied with every breath. It could not help itself but to deceive and dismay, to riddle and ruin. The more we conversed, the closer I drew to one singular ineluctable fact: I would gain no wisdom here. The Daemon's mind was a labyrinth of deceptions. Truth was trammelled at the heard of that maze and far beyond my meagre reach."

— The Liber Malefic, Warhammer: Daemons of Chaos Army Book (8th edition)

"In my time, I have stayed ahead of Wiesenthal and pulled the wool over the eyes of Himmler himself. If I cannot fool one American public-school teacher, I will pull my winding shroud around me and crawl down into my grave."

— Kurt Dussander, Different Seasons: Apt Pupil

"When you speak, everything is the truth. Your words never quaver, your vital signs remain normal, your facts seem consistent, and your eyes betray no deception whatsoever. No matter how outrageous your story might be, an objective observer will assume that at least you believe it's true."

— The Perfect Liar merit, Mage: The Ascension — Guide to the Technocracy

Thor: You're a talented liar, brother — always have been.
Loki: It's good to have you back.

— Thor

"Hayasaka lied as naturally as she breathed."

— Kaguya-sama: Love Is War

"Nick gave a ghostly sigh at these inaccuracies and, though they were distortions, so was his irritation at them. I'll go into these invariably drawn-out sagas of misinformation as we come to them, but the thing to keep in mind is that Nick had a strange way with the truth. I don't just mean that he was a good liar, I mean that he had the ability to distort the truth in the same way that a black hole has the ability to distort time and space. It wasn't something he did, it was something he was. When you were in his presence, the truth had a way of not looking the way it was supposed to look."

— The Golden Age of Censorship, by Paul Hoffman

"She's an actress that would put movie stars to shame."

— Cinder describing her mother, Brigit Stark, My Name Is Cinder

Dayna: But Servalan told us he was dead.
Avon: And you believed her?
Dayna: Well, she had no reason to lie.
Avon: She doesn't need one. It comes quite naturally to her, like breathing.

— Blake's 7, "Blake"

"Barron's at Princeton, studying pre-law, which is pretty funny because he is a compulsive liar. He's the kind of liar who totally forgets what he told you the last time, but he believes every single lie with such conviction that sometimes he can convince you of it. I don't think he'll last half a minute in court before he'll make up something outrageous about his client."

— The Curse Workers: White Cat

"If he tells you snow is white, he's lying."

— Mimir describing Odin, God of War Ragnarök

Atreus: Mimir... not sure how to ask this... There's stories Odin told me, like how he lost his eye, where the details are different from stories you've told me. And I trust you, of course, but... They don't seem like things he'd have a reason to lie about either.
Mimir: One thing to remember about liars, lad: They lie. They do it on principle. No issue too big or too small. They lie about anything they can get away with, and some things they can't, just to demonstrate their power over reality. You must always bear that in mind.

— A later discussion between Atreus and Mimir about Odin, God of War Ragnarök

Johnny Cage: You ever count up the lies you've told?
Shang Tsung: (chuckles) I doubt a number that large exists.

— Mortal Kombat 1

Mollymauk: Never trust the truth. The truth is vicious. The truth thinks you owe it something. None of that. I like my bullshit. It's good. It's happy. It makes other people happy.
Nott: But it's not who you are.
Mollymauk: It is exactly who I am.

— Critical Role

"To successfully deceive, mislead, and undermine... One must be able to do all of these things to oneself! And I am a man who may even betray himself!"

— Kaguragi Dybowski/Hachi Ohger, Ohsama Sentai King-Ohger

Real Life

"A liar is always lavish of oaths."

— Pierre Corneille

"A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes."

— Mark Twain

"The liar's punishment is, not in the least that he is not believed, but that he cannot believe anyone else."

— George Bernard Shaw, The Quintessence of Ibsenism

"An unexciting truth may be eclipsed by a thrilling falsehood."

— Aldous Huxley, Brave New World Revisited

"You will never learn what I am thinking. And those who boast most loudly that they know my thought, to such people I lie even more."

— Adolf Hitler to Franz Halder

"I caught Truman out in a dozen or so lies that everyone else preferred to believe. I can't think what labor of Hercules I thought I had undertaken, and certainly to no useful end, because the instant lie was Truman's art form, small but, paradoxically, authentic. One could watch the process. A famous name would be registered. The round pale fetus face would suddenly register a sort of tic, as if a switch had been thrown. 'Eleanor Roosevelt. Oh, I know her intimately!'"

— Gore Vidal on Truman Capote, Palimpsest

"Every word she writes is a lie, including 'and' and 'the.'"

— Mary McCarthy on, err... 'colleague' Lillian Hellman, The Dick Cavett Show

"The amount of energy necessary to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it."

— Alberto Brandolini, programmer

"There is a serene quality in a great hypocrite that I greatly admire. I don't think it's possible to be a frenzied hypocrite. That wouldn't do at all. There's nearly always a sublime self-assurance to a good hypocrite, don't you think? Hypocrites are not prone to self-doubt. I always imagine that great hypocrites have no interior life at all; what you see is what they are. All good actors have a touch of the hypocrite. I think I was born to be a hypocrite, all exterior and hollow, but wanting to amuse. Hypocrites can be very generous, too, so long as the world is watching."

— Tom Baker, Who on Earth Is Tom Baker?

"Something something something horrifically unfair government case against him and just like that, he becomes tech's 'hacktivist hero.'"

— Kathy Sierra on hacktivist/neo-Nazi Andrew "weev" Auernheimer

"Instead of moving to London and becoming a Nazi spy, Pujol moved to Portugal and flexed his mad B.S.ing skillz to the max. From his home office in Lisbon, armed only with a Spanish-language version of Frommer's Guide to England, a British railway schedule, and a couple road maps, he somehow convinced the Nazis that he had established himself as a secret agent working deep undercover in the British Isles. As if magically teleporting himself across the Channel to a country he'd never seen before wasn't enough of a feat, he then fabricated an entire organized network of badass fictional spies to come work for him and do awesome things in his name. Before long, this crazy imaginary spymaster built a network of twenty-seven (!!) fake men and women ranging from a Swiss banker who was horrified by Liverpool orgies to a Venezuelan dock worker trading wine bottles for information in Glasgow, and they were all feeding him intel about places he'd never actually been before, which he then relayed to the Germans. I probably don't need to mention that the Nazis weren't exactly known for taking it easy on guys who royally cocked them over, but Pujol apparently didn't even give a shit that he was playing with radioactive fire here — he was so balls-out that he mailed the letters from his local post office, passing it off as though he had a KLM pilot under his power that was flying the letters across the Channel and dropping them in a Portuguese mailbox. Incredibly, they bought it."

— Badass of the Week on Juan Pujol García

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