Faith & Spirit Quote by George Bancroft

Dishonesty, in Bancroft's line, isn’t a petty vice; it’s an appetite with claws. Calling it “grasping” gives deception a physical hunger, the kind that doesn’t merely want to get away with something but wants more territory, more control, more reality bent to its purposes. That word choice turns lying from a lapse into a force of nature: acquisitive, escalating, incapable of stopping at a single win.

The provocation is the near-blasphemous reach of the claim: dishonesty “would deceive God himself, were it possible.” Bancroft knows it isn’t possible, and the clause is the whole trick. By conceding divine omniscience, he preserves piety while still letting the imagination run wild. The subtext is moral psychology: the dishonest person doesn’t lie because the truth is hard; they lie because they believe the world is there to be managed. Their ambition outruns the boundaries of the real. Even God becomes, in their fantasy, just another audience to be played.

As a 19th-century American historian steeped in Protestant moral seriousness and writing in an era that prized civic virtue, Bancroft frames dishonesty as a public threat, not just a private flaw. This is the kind of sentence aimed at a republic: if deception is inherently expansionist, then tolerating “small” lies is naive because the impulse itself is imperial. The line works because it flatters no one. It makes the liar’s confidence sound ridiculous and terrifying at once.