Life & Wisdom Quote by Edward W. Howe

Americans, Howe suggests, don’t hate deception; they hate being treated like fools in private. The sting of his line is its boomerang logic: the nation that prides itself on plain dealing makes a cozy exception for the two lie factories it can’t stop consuming - the public platform and the printed page. He’s not condemning hypocrisy as a personal flaw so much as naming it as a civic habit, one that lets people feel morally superior while staying comfortably misinformed.

The craft here is in the narrowing. He doesn’t say Americans “sometimes tolerate” lies. He says they “detest all lies except” - a setup that sounds like ethical absolutism until it snaps into an accusation of selective outrage. “Spoken in public” covers the ritual lie: speeches, stump talk, patriotic varnish, the kind of performance everyone understands is partly theater. “Printed lies” hits the other pillar: news, pamphlets, advertising, the institutionalization of credibility. If it’s in ink, it’s been laundered.

Howe wrote in an era when mass-circulation newspapers and industrial-era politics were professionalizing persuasion. Yellow journalism and partisan press culture weren’t glitches; they were features of a modern attention economy. The subtext is bleakly contemporary: people don’t just accept public lies, they prefer them, because they arrive with social permission. Believing a lie together is easier than facing an uncomfortable truth alone.