The philosophers Saint Augustine, as well as Thomas Aquinas and Immanuel Kant, condemned all lying. However, Thomas Aquinas also had an argument for lying. According to all three, there are no circumstances in which one may lie. One must be murdered, suffer torture, or endure any other hardship, rather than lie, even if the only way to protect oneself is to lie. Each of these philosophers gave several arguments against lying, all compatible with each other. Among the more important arguments are:

Pinocchio a wooden puppet who turns into a real boy, where his nose grows bigger and longer each time he tells a lie.

In the New Testament, Jesus refers to the Devil as the father of lies (John 8:44) and Paul commands "Do not lie to one another" (Colossians 3:9, Cf.Leviticus 19:11). Jesus would seem to tell a lie to the Apostles in John 7:8-10, when He says "Go ye up unto this feast: I go not up yet unto this feast; for my time is not yet full come," but then later on goes up to attend the same festival.

Prisoner's dilemma

Truthiness is a word that U.S. television comedian Stephen Colbert popularized in 2005 as a satirical term to describe things that a person claims to know intuitively or "from the gut" without regard to evidence, logic, intellectual examination, or...

Within Shi'ite Islamic tradition,[1] the concept of Taqiyya (التقية - 'fear, guard against')[2] refers to a controversial dispensation allowing believers to conceal their faith when under threat, persecution or compulsion.[3] The word...

Bullshit (often bowdlerized to BS, or occasionally Bovine Scat), also Bullcrap, is a common English expletive. It can also be shortened to just "Bull". Most commonly, it describes incorrect, misleading, false language and statements. Literally, it...

Discovery of a lie tends to discredit other statements by the same speaker and can lead to social or legal sanctions against the speaker, such as ostracising or conviction for perjury.

Big Lie

The early 20th century American social critic and humorist H. L. Mencken, known for his "definitions" of terms, defined a demagogue as "one who will preach doctrines he knows to be untrue to men he knows to be idiots." Though this definition emphasizes...

Humbug is an archaic term meaning "hoax", or "jest". While the term was first attested in 1751 in student slang, its etymology is unknown. It is known, however, that it was used as profanity centuries ago, in places such as Great Britain. Its present...

This incorporation of deception into schemes of evolutionary advantage is a concept treated in the study of evolutionary game theory. Evolutionary game theory assumes that creatures are often in resource conflict or in predator/prey relationships with each other and develop strategies for advantage gain or loss reduction.

Misrepresentation of the People Act

The Boy Who Cried Wolf.

The Desseks are characters in a fictional universe called Cotrahviné, created by Dutch Science Fiction/Fantasy writer Tais Teng. They appear exclusively in his anthology "Glazen Speren" (Glass Spears) (1997), which has not yet been translated to...

Lying is a perversion of the natural faculty of speech, the natural end of which is to communicate the thoughts of the speaker.

Pralay in Hindu mythology means the day when 'shrishti' and Brahmaand i.e Cosmos will be destroyed by Nature's fury. The literal meaning for Pralay, coming from Sanskrit is devastating Flood of unimaginable magnitude. But in Hinduism, meaning of Pralay...

Cost underestimation

A lie is a type of deception in the form of an untruthful statement with the intention to deceive, often with the further intention to maintain a secret or reputation, or to avoid punishment. To lie is to state something one believes is false with the intention that it be taken for the truth by someone else. A liar is a person who is lying, who has lied, or who lies repeatedly. Lying is typically used to refer to deceptions in oral or written communication. Other forms of deception, such as disguises or forgeries, are generally not considered lies, though the underlying intent may be the same; however, even a true statement can be considered a lie if the person making that statement is doing so to deceive. In this situation, it is the intent of being untruthful rather than the truthfulness of the statement itself that is considered.

The capacity to lie is noted early and nearly universally in human development. Social psychology and developmental psychology are concerned with the theory of mind, which people employ to simulate another's reaction to their story and determine if a lie will be believable. The most commonly cited milestone, what is known as Machiavellian intelligence, is at the age of about four and a half years, when children begin to be able to lie convincingly. Before this, they seem simply unable to comprehend that anyone doesn't see the same view of events that they do -- and seem to assume that there is only one point of view: their own -- that must be integrated into any given story. Young children learn from experience that stating an untruth can avoid punishment for misdeeds, before they develop the theory of mind necessary to understand why it works. In this stage of development, children will sometimes tell fantastic and unbelievable lies because they lack the conceptual framework to judge whether a statement is believable or even to understand the concept of believability. When children first learn how lying works, they lack the moral understanding of when to refrain from doing it. It takes years of watching people lie and the results of lies to develop a proper understanding. Propensity to lie varies greatly between children, some doing so habitually and others being habitually honest. Habits in this regard are likely to change into early adulthood.

Pseudologia fantastica is a term applied by psychiatrists to the behaviour of habitual or compulsive lying.

When one lies, one undermines trust in society.

The Old Testament and New Testament of the Bible both contain statements that God cannot lie (Num 23:19, Ps 89:35, Hab. 2:3, Heb 6:13-18). The Old Testament adds that God hates a lying tongue (Prov 6:16-19, Ps. 5:6) and forbids men to lie (Lev 19:11, Pr. 14:5, Pr. 30:6, Zep 3:13 ) or to take refuge in lies (Isa 28:15, Da 11:27). Most famously, lying is forbidden in the Ten Commandments: "Thou shalt not bear false witness" (Exodus 20:2-17,Deuteronomy 5:6-21) a specific reference to perjury, but taken to have wider application. Old Testament accounts of lying include:^[1]

The capacity to lie has also been claimed to be possessed by non-humans in language studies with Great Apes. One famous case was that of Koko the gorilla; confronted by her handlers after a tantrum in which she had torn a steel sink out of its moorings, she signed in American Sign Language, "cat did it," pointing at her tiny kitten. It is unclear if this was a joke or a genuine attempt at blaming her tiny pet. Deceptive body language, such as feints that mislead as to the intended direction of attack or flight, is observed in many species including wolves. A mother bird deceives when it pretends to have a broken wing to divert the attention of a perceived predator -- including unwitting humans -- from the eggs in its nest to itself.

Within any scenario where dualistic (e.g., yes/no, black/white) answers are always given, a person who we know is consistently lying would paradoxically be a source of truth. There are many such paradoxes, the most famous one being known as the liar paradox, commonly expressed as "This sentence is a lie," or "This sentence is false." The so-called Epimenides paradox — "All Cretans are liars," as stated by Epimenides the Cretan — is a forerunner of this, though its status as a paradox is disputed. A class of related logic puzzles are known as knights and knaves, in which the goal is to determine who of a group of people is lying and who is telling the truth.

Polygraph "lie detector" machines measure the physiological stress a subject endures in a number of measures while he/she gives statements or answers questions. Spikes in stress are purported to indicate lying. The accuracy of this method is widely disputed, and in several well-known cases it was proven to have been deceived. Nonetheless, it remains in use in many areas, primarily as a method for eliciting confessions or employment screening. Polygraph results are not admissible as court evidence and are generally perceived to be pseudoscience. *Various truth drugs have been proposed and used anecdotally, though none are considered very reliable. The CIA attempted to find a universal "truth serum" in the MK-ULTRA project, but it was largely a fiasco.

Carlo Collodi's Pinocchio is a wooden puppet often led into trouble by his propensity to lie. His nose grows with every lie. A long nose has thus become a caricature of liars.

In the film Liar Liar, the lawyer Fletcher Reed (Jim Carrey) cannot lie for 24 hours due to a wish of his son which magically came true.

Sir Walter Scott's famous couplet "Oh, what a tangled web we weave / When first we practice to deceive!" describes the often difficult procedure of covering up a lie so that it is not detected at some future time. In "Human, All Too Human" philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche suggested that those who refrain from lying may do so only because of the difficulty involved in maintaining the lie. This is consistent with his general philosophy that divides or ranks people according to strength and ability; thus, some people tell the truth only out of weakness. A similar explanation is given by Paul Ekman in Why Don't We Catch Liars?

Specifically, predation often employs deception, as does avoidance of predation. A predator is deceptive if in the process of acquiring prey it conceals its location, uses camouflage capabilities of its skin and appendages, or dangles an appendage as a bait. A prey is deceptive if it uses camouflage to conceal itself or make it seem to be larger than it is or seem to be another species that is poisonous or distasteful to the predator (compare viceroy butterfly to monarch butterfly). Such capabilities to deceive likely developed very gradually during evolution and likely began as very small changes in the appearance or behavior of some organisms. As the changes brought advantage to the organism it may therefore have increased in number due to that advantage, and due to continued pressure from a predator or scarcity of prey the advantage locked in and became a trait of that creature.