lies

You can tell people the truth, but they'll never believe you until the event. Until it's too late. In the meantime, the truth will just piss them off and get you in a lot of trouble.

Major Major had lied, and it was good. He was not really surprised that it was good, for he had observed that people who did lie were, on the whole, more resourceful and ambitious and successful than people who did not lie.

Principles aren't of much account anyway, except at election-time. After that you hang them up to let them season.

the slickest way to lie is to tell the right amount of truth—then shut up.

"The profoundest instinct in man is to war against the truth; that is, against the Real. He shuns facts from his infancy. His life is a perpetual evasion. Miracle, chimera and to-morrow keep him alive. He lives on fiction and myth. It is the Lie that makes him free. Animals alone are given the privilege of lifting the veil of Isis; men dare not. The animal, awake, has no fictional escape from the Real because he has no imagination. Man, awake, is compelled to seek a perpetual escape into Hope, Belief, Fable, Art, God, Socialism, Immortality, Alcohol, Love. From Medusa-Truth he makes an appeal to Maya-Lie."

if he can get you to believe Moab was nuked by spending a million bucks, just imagine what the Russians and the big Internet companies are doing to your mind every day with much larger budgets.

Donald coughed, and thought of all the hero sagas of old, of men and women struggling for righteousness, always with a happy ending, always against impossible odds, always bullshit. Heroes didn't win. The heroes were whoever happened to win. History told their story – the dead didn't say a word. All of it was bullshit.

Vice knows she's ugly, so puts on her mask . . .

It was a mistake to speak one's mind at any time, unless it perfectly matched your political purpose; and it never did. Best to strip all statements of real content, this was a basic law of diplomacy.

"And so it has come about that the American view of the history of nuclear physics has prevailed."6 Is that true? Well, the president of the United States, Bill Clinton, celebrating the American century in his 1997 inaugural address, proclaimed, "Along the way, Americans split the atom." No one, to my knowledge, rose to contradict that proof that the winners write the history.

The whole process had been everything he hated—niggling on details and nuances, fighting over turns of phrase and the order information was presented in, fashioning something that, even where it wasn't outright false, was tailored to be misunderstood. Politics at its most political.