Carpenter's Column: Lest we grow complacent at its prevalence

The only statistics you can trust are those you falsified yourself.—Winston Churchill

Debts and lies are generally mixed together.--Rabelais

I keep reading between the lies.—Goodman Ace

You take the lies out of him, and he’ll shrink to the size of your hat; you take the malice out of him, and he’ll disappear.—Mark Twain

I have the most reliable friend you can have in American politics, and that is ready money.—Phil Gramm

He lies so bad he hires somebody else to call his dogs.—Anonymous

I must choose my words carefully in order to avoid any negative interpretations; among politicians, this tactic is known as lying.—Pat Paulsen

In politics, absurdity is not a handicap.—Napoleon Bonaparte

If at first you don’t succeed, lie, lie again.—Dr. Laurence Peter

Very sorry. Can’t come; lie follows by post.—Lord Charles Beresford

I am a man of fixed and unbending principles, the first of which is to be flexible at all times.—Everett Dirksen

Every word she writes is a lie, including “and” and “the.”—Mary McCarthy

I have a friend; he keeps trying to convince me he’s a compulsive liar, but I don’t believe him.—Ben Bailey

The best liar is he who makes the smallest amount of lying go the longest way.—Samuel Butler

Americans detest all lies except lies spoken in public or printed lies.—Edgar Watson Howe

The devil is the father of lies, but he neglected to patent the idea, and the business now suffers from the competition.—Josh Billings

It is hard to believe that a man is telling the truth when you know that you would lie if you were in his place.—H.L. Mencken

The enemy isn’t conservatism. The enemy isn’t liberalism. The enemy is bull****.—Lars-Erik Nelson

One of the penalties for refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors.—Plato

The trust of the innocent is the liar’s most useful tool.—Stephen King

The difference between a politician and a statesman is that a politician thinks about the next election while the statesman thinks about the next generation.—James Freeman Clarke

The best time to listen to a politician is when he is on a stump on a street corner in the rain late at night when he’s exhausted. Then he doesn’t lie.—Theodore White

An honest politician is one who, when he is bought, stays bought.—Simon Cameron

There are two things that are important in politics. The first is money, and I can’t remember the second.—Mark Hanna

He knows nothing and thinks he knows everything. That points clearly to a political career.—George Bernard Shaw

If we ever injected truth into politics, we’d have no politics.—Will Rogers