Lying

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.

False encouragement is a kind of theft: It steals time, energy, and motivation that a person could put toward some other purpose.

Lying is, almost by definition, a refusal to cooperate with others. It condenses a lack of trust and trustworthiness into a single act. It is both a failure of understanding and an unwillingness to be understood. To lie is to recoil from relationship.

To lie is to intentionally mislead others when they expect honest communication.

I think the Golden Rule has some light to shed here: Are you concealing a secret that you would want to know about if you were the other person? I don’t see a generic answer to questions of this kind. It is possible that certain truths are best left concealed, all things considered. But if one wants to live a truly honest life, there is no substitu

In many circumstances in life, false encouragement can be very costly to another person.

By lying, we deny our friends access to reality9—and their resulting ignorance often harms them in ways we did not anticipate.

To lie is to intentionally mislead others when they expect honest communication.

A commitment to honesty does not necessarily require that we disclose facts about ourselves that we would prefer to keep private.