Leadership Quote by Boyle Roche

“Half the lies our opponents tell about us are untrue” is political judo that accidentally reveals the blade. Roche, an 18th-century Irish politician famous for malapropisms and verbal pratfalls, reaches for righteous indignation and lands on something more interesting: a confession that some of the “lies” might be true. The line works because it mimics the combative logic of partisan defense while quietly sabotaging it. You can hear the intended posture - our enemies smear us, we are the victims - but the arithmetic turns the rebuttal into a backhanded admission.

The subtext is less about factual accuracy than about the performance of credibility. By quantifying slander (“half”), Roche gives the impression of measured judgment, as if he’s audited the accusations and is reporting results. That faux precision is a classic political move: numbers imply objectivity even when they’re doing rhetorical cosplay. Yet the sentence can’t hold its own weight. If only half the lies are untrue, the remaining half are either true statements mislabeled as lies or lies that are, somehow, true - a conceptual car crash that exposes how elastic “truth” becomes in factional warfare.

Context matters: Roche operated in a parliamentary culture where oratory was sport and reputations were currency. The line survives because it captures a perennial dynamic - politics as a contest to control the narrative - while also mocking it from inside the costume. It’s not just a gaffe; it’s an X-ray of spin.