Life & Wisdom Quote by Rebecca West

West skewers a comforting superstition: that self-report is the clean, ethical alternative to gossip. Most of us have learned to discount what people say about each other because it’s obviously contaminated by rivalry, desire, and selective memory. What’s more unsettling is her second move - the claim that autobiographical testimony is even less reliable. That reversal is the engine of the line. It flips our moral hierarchy (malicious talk bad, self-description good) and replaces it with a colder diagnosis: the self is the most invested propagandist of all.

The intent isn’t to argue that people are always lying; it’s sharper than that. West targets the way sincerity can function as camouflage. We narrate ourselves to secure status, to preempt criticism, to make our compromises look like principles. Even confession can be a performance, strategically curated to signal honesty while controlling the frame. If gossip is distortion through distance, self-talk is distortion through proximity: you’re too close to your own motives to see them whole, and too dependent on your self-image to report them neutrally.

Context matters. West wrote through eras that made “official stories” suspect: world wars, propaganda, ideological sorting, the rise of mass persuasion. Her journalism and fiction circle the gap between public posture and private impulse, especially among the respectable classes who believe their own press. The subtext is almost psychoanalytic without being soft: the deepest untruths are often the ones we tell in good faith, because believing them is part of the bargain of being able to live with ourselves.