Wit & Attitude Quote by Robert Brault

Brault’s line lands because it refuses the comforting fantasy that dishonesty is a single, contained act. One lie is already a social weapon - a story engineered to shape what someone else believes. But the second lie is the more corrosive one: the private narrative that makes the first feel necessary, harmless, even noble. That doubling is the intent. He’s not moralizing about “truth” in the abstract; he’s diagnosing the mental accounting that lets ordinary people do questionable things without feeling like villains.

The subtext is that self-deception isn’t a side effect of lying; it’s the fuel. Most people can tolerate being strategic, defensive, polite, or opportunistic. Few can tolerate being “a liar.” So we manufacture a rationale: I did it to protect them, to keep the peace, because they wouldn’t understand, because everyone does it, because the system forced my hand. The phrasing “to justify it” is the pressure point. Justification isn’t aimed at the audience; it’s aimed at the conscience.

Contextually, Brault writes in a late-20th/early-21st-century key where ethics is less about grand sins and more about small compromises repeated until they become personality. The quote fits a culture saturated with branding - personal, professional, political - where storytelling is constant and sincerity is performance-tested. Calling each lie “two lies” is a neat philosophical trick: it turns a moment of deception into a pattern of identity-making. The real damage isn’t that others are misled; it’s that the liar has to live inside a fabricated version of themselves to keep the whole structure standing.