Gullibility

“ Some dealer in those cheap apothegms which commend themselves to the public gullibility, through the public tendency to moralize concerning subjects of which it knows nothing, has rendered himself famous, and the great majority of mankind asses, by the announcement that “everything must have an end.” ”

“ The gullibility of man is one of the most prominent features of our nature. Various periods and times, when whole nations have as it were with one consent run into the most incredible and the grossest absurdities, perpetually offer themselves in the page of history; and in the records of remote antiquity it plainly appears that such delusions continued through successive centuries. ”

“ The mass of this evidence, ancient and modern, traditional and statistical, is beneath consideration; the palpitating mood in which it is gathered and received, even when ostensibly scientific, is such that gullibility and fiction play a very large part in the report; for it is not to be assumed that a man, because he speaks in the first person and addresses a learned society, has lost the primordial faculty of lying. ”

“ We hope that it will not be inferred that we desire to explain how to deceive persons with regard to photographs of “spirits,” for this is not so; we only hope that they will be made merely for amusement, and, if possible, to expose persons who practice on the gullibility of inexperienced persons. ”

“ In many of the public papers, you have been called, in the most direct and offensive terms, a liar, and a coward. When did you reply to these foul accusations? You have been quite silent, quite chop-fallen: therefore, because you was silent, the nation has a right to pronounce you to be both a liar and a coward, from your own argument: but, Sir, I will give you fair play; will afford you an opportunity to wipe off the first appellation; by desiring the proofs of your charge against me. Produce them! To wipe off the last, produce yourself. ”

“ He went forth once more, and, difficult as it appears to the intelligence of honest and commonplace folk, he went forth to prosper and live luxuriously—so gullible is the world, so ready and eager to be cheated and deceived. ”

“ Do you not offer them a mortal insult by presenting to them such nonsense as argument? And if your constituents were capable of suffering themselves to be deceived by such unspeakable absurdities, or to accept the insult without resentment, would such an attempt at deception under any circumstances be the part of an honest man? Is there really no blush rising to your cheeks when you look at your performance?
These are the three falsehoods which, when writing my last letter, I selected for exposure from a larger number. ”

“ Those that design to do ill support themselves by falsehood and lying: A wicked doer gives ear, with a great deal of pleasure, to false lips, that will justify him in the ill he does, to those that aim to make public disturbances, catch greedily at libels, and false stories, that defame the government and the administration. 2. Those that take the liberty to tell lies take a pleasure in hearing them told: A liar gives heed to a malicious backbiting tongue, that he may have something to graft his lies upon, and with which to give them some colour of truth and so to support them. ”

“ It's lies does it, all the world over—leastways with the general public in England. It's lies sells damaged goods. It's lies as makes 'em turn their pockets out into your lap. It's lies as carries votes. It's lies as governs the land. The general public likes 'em. It loves 'em. They be as sweet and dear to the general public as thistles is to asses.'
[74]
Then he lay quiet, except only that he turned his head from side to side, as though looking at something. ”

“ But from that eventful day to the present moment, falsehood, hypocrisy, deception, imposition, cant, bigotry, false appearances and false pretences, superstitions, and all conceivable sorts of humbugs, have had a full swing, and he or she who watches these things most closely, and reflects most deeply upon these various peculiarities, bearings, and results, will be best qualified to detect and to avoid them. For this reason, I should look upon myself as somewhat of a public benefactor, in exposing the humbugs of the world, if I felt competent to do the subject full justice. ”

“ The result was a determination to hold myself neutral till I had at least discovered the author of the lines I held in my hand. If they came from a credible person—but how could they do so and be written and posted up in the manner they were? An honest man does not seek any such roundabout way to strike his blow. Only a coward or a villain would take this method to arouse public curiosity, and perhaps create public suspicion.
And yet who could say that a coward and a villain might not be speaking the truth even in an accusation of this nature? ”

“ You, your very existence is a lie, and you are the server of lies, and you and your fellow liars would have created them if they didn't already exist, you love them so. You live by a fraud, and you want to drag everybody into the comedy you play every day in your churches, everybody who is fool enough to drop a coin into your greedy palm! ”

“ This is received as a piece of wit, and all the by-standers laugh and applaud the ingenuity and invention of him who told the lie, and they all regale themselves at the expence of the innocent credulous person. But I consider this as an abuse; for does the simple and easy credulity of any person give others a right to insult him? admitting that his excessive credulity proceeds from the scantiness of his understanding; are we peradventure only obliged to be civil to, and treat with urbanity, the discreet and the acute? ”

“ Statement and proof were one, and how ready, and indeed eager, human nature was to believe the wildest nonsense told by witless fool or unscrupulous liar, the records of such manias as the famous Salem trials appallingly evidence. Men high in the state, as well as helpless old women in their dotage, disfigured with "witch-moles" or incriminating beards on their withered faces, were equally vulnerable to this most fearful of weapons ever placed by ignorance in the hands of the malignant gossip. ”

“ The same consequences follow falsehood and deception, whether practised by individuals or public governors, and they will both find in the end that they have been guided by cunning, and not by wisdom: for although the ignorant part of mankind may, to serve the temporary purposes of a bad government, be acted upon by false alarms of imaginary dangers, yet even these in time will see through the stale tricks and artifices of those whose designs are to gull and impose upon them. ”

“ But secret falsehood, which in the Lord's sight is the same as open falsehood,—secret falsehood, under all its various forms of misrepresentation, deception, cunning, is daily and hourly committed by how many? by how many, too, who think that they would scorn to be guilty of a direct falsehood? Look through the business world. ”

“ By such a course I shall surround myself with a thick atmosphere of falsehood and fraud, and in that I must live. It may matter little to me, in my cloud-castle of sweet illusions and darling lies; but it matters much to Man that I have made my neighbors ready to deceive. ”

“ False priests, false prophets, false doctors, false patriots, false prodigies of every kind, veiling their proceeding in mystery, have always addressed themselves at an immense advantage to the popular credulity, and have been, perhaps, more indebted to that resource in gaining and keeping for a time the upper hand of Truth and Common Sense, than to any half dozen items in the whole catalogue of imposture. ”

“ Liar call not him who squares All his ends and aims with theirs; But from sacred truth to vary, Like the false depositary, Is to be, by every rule Both a liar and a fool. The story goes: A man of trade, In Persia, with his neighbour made Deposit, as he left the state, Of iron, say a hundredweight. Return'd, said he, 'My iron, neighbour.' 'Your iron! you have lost your labour; I grieve to say it,--'pon my soul, A rat has eaten up the whole. ”

“ Lie not at all, neither in a little thing nor in a great, neither in the substance nor in the circumstance, neither in word nor deed: that is, pretend not what is false; cover not what is true; and let the measure of your affirmation or denial be the understanding of your contractor; for he who deceives the buyer or the seller by speaking what is true, in a sense not intended or understood by the other, is a liar and a thief. A Perfect Master must avoid that which deceives, equally with that which is false. ”

“ This extraordinary story does not so much prove how gullible men are, as how good and trustworthy most men are, so that when we do come across a rogue who takes advantage of us, it is like an earthquake that shakes us out of our moral equilibrium. ”

“ Since fiction writing is my livelihood, I cannot and will not deny that I am an accomplished liar—indeed, almost an habitual one. Therefore, I feel some small pique when, on the one occasion on which I stick strictly to the truth, I am accused of fraud. ”

“ That's the way it's always gone: first the liar tells his lie, and some of the fools believe it, and proselyte the other fools, and when there are enough of them, their faith begins to work on the liar's own unbelief, till he takes his lie for the truth. Was that the way, you miserable skunk?”
“It was exactly the way, Squire Braile, and you can't tell how it gains on you, step by step. You see all those educated people like Mr. Enraghty, and all those good men like Mr. Hingston taking it for gospel, and you can't deny it yourself. They convince you of it.” ”

“ Another method, by which the meanest people may do injury to the public, is the spreading of lies and false rumours; thus raising a distrust among the people of a nation, causing them to mistake their true interest, and their enemies for their friends; and this hath been likewise too successful a practice among us, where we have known the whole kingdom misled by the grossest lies, raised upon occasion to serve some particular turn. ”

“ It might be difficult to determine which displayed the greater folly—those who made false representations, or those who, warned by previous deception, appeared so ready to be influenced anew by deception equally gross. ”

“ The public mind should be disabused upon this subject, and the mask of presumption and arrogance which hides ignorance and fraud should be torn off, and the world should learn more correctly to discriminate between true and false merit. ”

“ We have at least three kinds of lying and species, or types, of liars--first, the common, ordinary, everyday liar, who lies without rime or reason, rule or compass, aim, intent or interest, in whose mind the partition between truth and falsehood has fallen down; then the sensational, imaginative liar, who has a tale to tell; and, finally, the mean, malicious liar, who would injure his neighbor.
This last is, indeed, but rare. Human nature is at its base amicable, because if nothing hinders it wants to please. All of us, however, are more or less its unconscious victims. ”

“ When it is realized that a system that aims to instruct men in regard to beliefs appealing most earnestly and deeply to the human heart appears in the light of exact investigation as a tottering framework, held together by gross fraud, covered over with innocent self-deception, but also with vulgar sham ”

“ Surely "man is a gullible animal"—the bait that a grey rat would reject, is swallowed by grey-headed men. And whilst all their nefarious schemes are going on, the authors and managers of the farce sit complaisantly behind the curtain, filling their pockets—not with coppers, but—with sovereigns. ”

“ I mortally hate anything that in the slightest degree savours of deception, either in words or conduct, and have made it an invariable rule never to engage in any transaction needing the one or the other for its successful accomplishment; but here was a case in which I had no choice but to meet guile with guile. ”

“ Mere knowledge of our public evils, economic and political, will henceforward spread; and though we must suffer the external consequences of so prolonged a regime of lying, the lies are now known to be lies. ”

“ Human credulity once within their grasp, they could wield this tremendous engine at their will, directing it either to good or bad intents, but more often to purposes of fraud and self-aggrandisement. ”

“ The rouge and powder on the lady's cheek—they are lies, both of them; the baronial and ducal crests are lies and the fools who use them are liars; the people who soak themselves in rum have nothing but lies in their heads; the multitude who live by their wits and the lack of them in others—they are all liars; the many who imagine a vain thing and pretend to be what they are not liars everyone of them. ”

“ Will you suffer them to insult your understanding, and to stamp you as incorrigible fools, with impunity? This, indeed, is one of the cases in which we do not know what to admire most—the towering impudence of the imposters, or the unfathomable stupidity of the victims. ”

“ II. The grossest kind of lying, or speaking a known falsehood under the awful solemnity of an oath.—Men violate truth when they affix to words an arbitrary meaning or make in their own minds certain secret reservations with a design to disguise facts and deceive the hearers. When we express doubtful matters in terms and with an air of assurance, we may materially injure as well as grossly deceive our neighbour. ”

“ He, however, in spite of such seeming, sought to lead other minds to fancy that fraud and malice acting upon credulity—in other words, that cunning and malicious embodied human beings, and none other—were concerned in their manifestation. ”

“ I have known people who seemed to have been born liars. The falsehoods of their lives extended from cradle to grave. Prevarication, misrepresentation, and dishonesty of speech appeared in their first utterances and was as natural to them as any of their infantile diseases, and was a sort of moral croup or spiritual scarlatina. But many have been placed in circumstances where this tendency has day by day, and hour by hour, been called to larger development. ”