Daily Inspiration Quote by Desiderius Erasmus

Erasmus slips the knife in with a smile. "A good portion of speaking will consist in knowing how to lie" reads like a provocation, but it’s really a humanist diagnosis: language is never just a delivery system for truth. It’s a social instrument, and like any instrument, it’s tuned to the room.

The genius is the word "portion". He’s not claiming all speech is deception, just admitting that persuasion, diplomacy, and self-presentation require selective disclosure, tactful omission, strategic framing. In the Renaissance world Erasmus helped shape, rhetoric was a prized civic skill - the art of moving audiences, smoothing conflict, navigating courts and churches where blunt truth could be not just rude but dangerous. When he says "knowing how", he’s pointing less to moral collapse than to competence: the lie as craft, not pathology.

The subtext is sharper: societies demand performance. The expectation that a speaker be endlessly sincere is itself a kind of naive myth, convenient for those who want to police tone while ignoring power. Erasmus, famous for satirical edge and ecclesiastical tightrope-walking, understood that "truth" without strategy can be self-indulgence. You can be right and still be useless.

It also reads as a warning to listeners. If speaking involves lies, then listening requires skepticism. Erasmus is reminding us that public language is curated. The ethical question isn’t whether we ever bend the truth, but who gets to, for what ends, and at what cost.