Wit & Attitude Quote by Bo Bennett

Bennett’s line is a businessman’s morality play, but it’s calibrated like advice you’d hear in a boardroom, not a pulpit. It concedes the temptation up front: lying can be useful. It buys time, spares feelings, protects leverage, keeps a deal alive. By granting that point, the quote disarms the eye-roll that greets most honesty slogans. Then it pivots with a quiet escalation: whatever the short-term upside, truth has a superior return.

The subtext is reputational economics. In commerce, trust is a compound asset; deception is a one-time cash-out with fees you don’t see until later. A lie doesn’t just risk exposure, it creates ongoing maintenance costs: remembering versions, managing perceptions, building contingencies, fearing audits of the story. Truth, by contrast, is operationally efficient. It reduces drag. It lets you move faster because you’re not running parallel systems of reality.

The phrase “better reason” is doing heavy lifting. It implies a hierarchy of incentives rather than a moral binary, appealing to self-interest as much as virtue. That’s the intent: to make honesty feel like the strategically savvy choice, not the saintly one. It also hints at a leadership context, where the real damage of lying isn’t personal guilt but organizational corrosion. Teams that suspect spin stop sharing bad news; customers who sense manipulation stop forgiving mistakes.

As a modern business aphorism, it’s less about purity than durability: truth as the only strategy that scales.