William Stafford Quotes

The power of lying is much less than the power of what is not to be discussed.

Lying is done with words and also with silence.

There's a degree of deception in silence.

Sometimes speech is no more than a device for saying nothing - and a neater one than silence.

Speech was given to the ordinary sort or men, whereby to communicate their mind; but to wise men, whereby to conceal it.

It's not just politicians. Any spokesman for a vested interest is well schooled in how to say what it is they wish to say, which may bear no relation at all to what you've asked them.

The worst kind of lying I've ever done is keeping things from people.

Frank and explicit – that is the right line to take when you want to conceal your own mind and to confuse the minds of others.

… he knew the lie of silence to be as evil as the lie of speech.

Trump is a master obfuscator. Like an octopus escaping a predator, he releases a cloud of ink when called to the carpet on one of his many lies. His strategy? Obfuscate, then reference others. 'Millions agree,' 'everyone knows,' 'many have done it.'

Noise is an easy thing to hide behind. If you make a lot of noise and shout behind that, nobody can tell what you're singing.

What did you see?' he asked then. Nothing,' I told him. 'Because nothing is what you wanted me to see, though the man on the table might disagree.

The speech we hear is an indication of that which we don't hear. It is a necessary avoidance, a violent, sly, and anguished or mocking smoke screen which keeps the other in its true place. When true silence falls we are left with echo but are nearer nakedness. One way of looking at speech is to say that it is a constant stratagem to cover nakedness.

That is your trick, your bit of filthy magic: invisibility, and the anaesthetic power to deaden my attention in your direction.

Speech is too often not the art of concealing thought, but of quite stifling and suspending thought, so that there is none to conceal.

Silence hides nothing. Words conceal.

Anything I tell you is an alibi for something else." Then let's be quiet together.

You didn't tell a lie, you just left a big hole in the truth.

Silence is said to be golden, but the best fools the world has ever produced had nothing to say on the subject

And this wasn’t lying, not really. It was leaving out.

When truth is replaced by silence,the silence is a lie.

The gift of words is the gift of deception and illusion.

From what you didn’t say, lies that you did say.

God gave humans language so they could conceal their thoughts from one another.

What you didn't tell someone was just as debilitating as what you did.