Wit & Attitude Quote by Charles Edward Montague

Montague’s line is a small demolition of the practical-minded excuse we hand ourselves when we shade the truth: lying works. It’s efficient, frictionless, a social lubricant that can get you “out of a scrape” with minimal pain. He grants the lie its utility first, which is what makes the second clause land so hard. The surprise isn’t moralistic thunder; it’s aesthetic. “Strangely and beautifully,” he writes, as if honesty were less a duty than an experience with its own physics.

The word “scrape” matters. It’s not grand tragedy; it’s the petty messes of daily life where deception feels harmless, even smart. Montague is writing into a journalistic ethos where credibility is both currency and temptation: the press trades in narratives that can be cleaned up, simplified, made more saleable. His sentence suggests that integrity isn’t just a public virtue, it’s an interior sensation - “rapture” - that arrives only after you’ve absorbed the consequences you were trying to dodge.

Subtext: the lie doesn’t merely avoid punishment; it steals something subtler, the clear, almost exhilarating alignment between what happened and what you’re willing to say happened. He frames truth-telling as a kind of earned joy, not because suffering is noble, but because the self stops splitting into manager and managed. Take the scrape, leave out the lie, and the payoff is not approval - it’s wholeness. Montague’s quiet provocation is that honesty isn’t pious restraint; it’s a liberation you didn’t know you were bargaining away.