Wit & Attitude Quote by Samuel Butler

Butler’s line flatters honesty with one hand and robs it with the other. “Any fool can tell the truth” sounds like a moral compliment until you register the insult: truth-telling can be lazy, automatic, even clueless. The real intelligence test, he suggests, isn’t whether you can speak facts, but whether you can manage appearances. In a Victorian culture obsessed with propriety, reputation, and the choreography of “good taste,” that’s not just a naughty paradox; it’s a social diagnosis.

The phrasing is doing quiet violence. “Truth” is made cheap by being easy; “lie” is upgraded into an art that requires “sense.” Butler isn’t simply endorsing deception. He’s pointing at the uncomfortable reality that communities run on selective disclosure, tact, euphemism, and strategic omissions. To “lie well” isn’t always to fabricate; it’s to craft a story that keeps the peace, protects status, or sustains a shared fiction everyone benefits from. The subtext: society rewards narrative control more reliably than it rewards candor.

Butler, a poet and a lifelong irritant to received wisdom (especially religious and moral certainty), uses the epigram as a scalpel. The sentence invites readers to feel superior to liars, then forces them to notice how often they admire the competent ones: the politician who smooths contradictions, the respectable family that curates its scandals, the friend who offers a merciful version of the truth. The sting is that “sense” here isn’t virtue; it’s social intelligence, and it’s often indistinguishable from hypocrisy.