James Agee Quotes

To say that "the camera cannot lie" is merely to underline the multiple deceits that are now practised in its name.

People are much more willing nowadays to believe that pictures lie than [that] they can express any kind of truth.

While photographs may not lie, liars may photograph.

People say photographs don't lie, mine do.

... if a man really and truly believed that black was white, you might advise him to see an oculist, but you mustn't call him a liar.

I don't know what it's going to take for people to really wake up and understand that they [the Bush administration] are liars and they are murderers.

That's what you get for telling the truth. Someone calls you a liar. Most people will accept a likely lie to an unlikely truth. In fact, they prefer it.

When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is to co-operate with evil, and in some small way to become evil oneself. One's standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control.

The reason why most people are frustrated is because a lie cannot be turned into a truth.

Don't lies eventually lead to the truth? And don't all my stories, true or false, tend toward the same conclusion? Don't they all have the same meaning? So what does it matter whether they are true or false if, in both cases, they are significant of what I have been and what I am? Sometimes it is easier to see clearly into the liar than into the man who tells the truth. Truth, like light, blinds. Falsehood, on the contrary, is a beautiful twilight that enhances every object.

The insincerity of man-all men are liars, partial or hiders of facts, half tellers of truths, shirks, moral sneaks. When a merely honest man appears he is a comet-his fame is eternal-needs no genius, no talent-mere honesty

I don't like to know too much because I'm a terrible liar.

"I'm sorry," she said humbly. "I haven't wanted to lie to you." "I should hope so. You're the worst liar I've ever met." He thought about it for a moment, then added, " - or the best. Now I'm all confused.

Some people try to get out of jury duty by lying. You don't have to lie. Tell the judge the truth. Tell him you'd make a terrific juror because you can spot guilty people.

Lying to other people is fine and usually funny, but lying to yourself is tacky.

Even a liar tells a hundred truths to one lie; he has to, to make the lie good for anything.

I’ve never agreed with the conventional wisdom that ‘actors are great liars.’ If more people understood the acting process, the goals of good actors, the conventional wisdom would be ‘actors are terrible liars,’ because only bad actors lie on the job. The good ones hate fakery and avoid manufactured emotion at all costs. Any script is enough of a lie anyway. (What experience does any actor have with flying a spacecraft? Killing someone?) What’s called for, what actors are hired for, is to bring reality to the arbitrary.

We Indians really should be better liars, considering how often we've been lied to.

Those who think it is permissible to tell white lies soon grow color-blind.

I think it's a very legitimate aspect of American life to criticize and to disagree and to debate. But I want to say I think it's a lie to say that the president lied to the American people. I sat on the Robb-Silverman Commission. I saw many, many analysts that came before that committee. I asked every one of them-I said, 'Did-were you ever pressured politically or any other way to change your analysis of the situation as you saw?' Every one of them said no.

The candid camera is the greatest liar in the photographic family.... It is anarchic, naïve, and superficial.

If falsehood, like truth, had but one face, we would be more on equal terms. For we would consider the contrary of what the liar said to be certain. But the opposite of truth has a hundred thousand faces and an infinite field.

Lies are just stories, and stories are all that matter. We all tell stories. Some are more truthful than others, maybe, but in the end the only thing that counts is what you can make people believe.

Liars are the cause of all the sins and crimes in the world.

A liar must have a good memory. -Mendacem oportet esse memorem