Politics & Power Quote by I. F. Stone

Stone’s line lands like a slap because it’s absolutist on purpose. “Every government” and “nothing” aren’t careful claims; they’re stress tests. He’s not inviting a seminar on bureaucratic nuance. He’s trying to jolt citizens out of the passive, sleepwalking habit of treating official statements as baseline truth. Coming from I. F. Stone - the muckraking journalist who built his career by reading the fine print everyone else ignored - the provocation doubles as a job description: power lies, so your civic duty is verification.

The subtext is less nihilism than method. Stone is saying: assume deception, then do the work. His cynicism isn’t fashionable distrust; it’s disciplined skepticism. Governments, especially in wartime and national-security settings, have structural incentives to shade reality: to protect operations, preserve legitimacy, avoid panic, win elections. “Liars” in this frame doesn’t only mean cartoon villains. It includes spokespersons, sanitized reports, euphemisms, and the bureaucratic art of telling the truth in a way that misleads.

Context matters: Stone wrote in an era bracketed by the Red Scare, Vietnam, and the long pre-Watergate apprenticeship in official deception. His famous newsletter thrived precisely because he treated public records as adversarial evidence, not neutral information. The line works rhetorically because it gives the audience permission to distrust without feeling conspiratorial: the target isn’t a secret cabal, it’s the predictable behavior of institutions guarding their interests.

It’s also a dare to journalism itself. If you repeat what officials say, you’re not reporting; you’re laundering.