Wit & Attitude Quote by Graham Greene

Greene’s jab lands because it treats “truth” as a social event, not a laboratory result. Champagne isn’t framed as a moral lubricant so much as a narrative one: it loosens the carefully curated self, coaxing people into the kind of overstatement and confession that sober life edits out. The wit is in the inversion. A lie detector, supposedly a tool of certainty, becomes a mere antagonist in a game of performance. Faced with the machine, the subject doesn’t get honest; he gets strategic.

The subtext is classic Greene: distrust of institutions, and an almost priestly interest in confession minus the comforting theology. Champagne produces truth by inviting risk. It makes a person “expansive, even reckless” - not just talkative, but willing to gamble his image. That’s the Greene move: truth arrives sideways, through temptation, vanity, and the desire to be admired for one’s candor. The line also needles modern faith in technological objectivity. The polygraph doesn’t reveal character; it provokes it, turning truth into a contest between inner panic and outward control.

Context matters. Greene wrote through an era of espionage, interrogations, and bureaucratic suspicion, when “truth” was often something extracted, weaponized, or procedurally certified. His quip suggests that coercive systems don’t purify honesty; they refine deception. Champagne, absurdly, becomes the more reliable interrogator because it doesn’t demand truth - it seduces it, letting people volunteer the parts they usually guard.