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Politics & Power Quote by L. Neil Smith

"I'm tired of being lied to by government, by the media, and by every corporation I have anything to do with"

About this Quote

Exhaustion is doing the rhetorical heavy lifting here. L. Neil Smith doesn’t open with an argument; he opens with burnout. “I’m tired” turns political critique into a bodily state, implying the speaker has endured a long drip of manipulations and has finally hit the limit where persuasion stops working. It’s an emotional credential: not naïve outrage, but someone who’s been paying attention long enough to be worn down.

The line’s structure matters. “Government, the media, and every corporation” forms a three-part indictment that collapses the usual boundaries between public authority, information gatekeepers, and private commerce. The subtext is that these institutions aren’t merely flawed in different ways; they are functionally aligned in producing a managed reality. “Lied to” is the key charge because it frames the problem as epistemic, not just political: you can’t bargain with a system if you can’t trust its basic descriptions of the world.

“Every corporation I have anything to do with” widens the net from abstract power to daily life. It suggests there’s no clean exit. You’re implicated just by buying, working, clicking, signing. That phrasing also performs a kind of preemptive defense: the speaker isn’t claiming purity, only entanglement.

Smith, a libertarian-leaning science fiction writer, is operating in a post-Watergate, post–PR-saturation America where institutions learned to speak in soothing euphemisms and brand-safe half-truths. The intent isn’t subtle reconciliation; it’s to authorize distrust as rational, even self-respecting. The cynicism lands because it doesn’t claim a hidden cabal so much as a familiar pattern: everyone with leverage has incentives to distort, and the consumer-citizen is left to swallow it until they can’t.

Quote Details

TopicHonesty & Integrity
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Citation Formats

APA Style (7th ed.)
Smith, L. Neil. (n.d.). I'm tired of being lied to by government, by the media, and by every corporation I have anything to do with. FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/im-tired-of-being-lied-to-by-government-by-the-153714/

Chicago Style
Smith, L. Neil. "I'm tired of being lied to by government, by the media, and by every corporation I have anything to do with." FixQuotes. Accessed February 2, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/im-tired-of-being-lied-to-by-government-by-the-153714/.

MLA Style (9th ed.)
"I'm tired of being lied to by government, by the media, and by every corporation I have anything to do with." FixQuotes, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/im-tired-of-being-lied-to-by-government-by-the-153714/. Accessed 2 Feb. 2026.

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L. Neil Smith (born May 12, 1946) is a Writer from USA.

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