Wit & Attitude Quote by William Shenstone

Lying, Shenstone suggests, is not a single act but a slippery apprenticeship in perception. The first move is almost tactical: dress the false in the costume of the plausible, borrow the rhythms of fact, mimic the tone of sincerity. That’s the beginner’s lie, dependent on the audience’s normal trust in shared reality. The real sting is his second clause, where lying graduates from deception to sabotage. After enough fabrication, the liar doesn’t just smuggle in one fake story; he erodes the very machinery people use to tell stories apart. Truth starts to look counterfeit because the criteria for “true” have been worn down through overuse and abuse.

The line works because it frames dishonesty as self-accelerating and self-defeating. Shenstone isn’t only warning the public; he’s diagnosing the liar’s psychology. To keep a lie standing, you must keep adjusting the world around it. That requires constant reinterpretation of evidence, constant suspicion of anyone who contradicts you. Eventually, the liar lives inside an upside-down epistemology where contradiction equals threat and clarity equals trap.

As an 18th-century poet in a culture steeped in moral instruction and social reputation, Shenstone’s warning also lands as a critique of performance. Polite society runs on appearances; the liar is simply the person who takes that logic to its cruel extreme. Read now, it sounds like an early sketch of “post-truth” dynamics: not merely making people believe something untrue, but making them doubt that anything can be known with confidence at all.