Life & Wisdom Quote by Katherine Fullerton Gerould

A cause that needs constant lying isn’t merely “misunderstood”; it’s structurally brittle. Gerould’s line is a moral stress test disguised as a shrug. The key word is regularly. One-off deception can be chalked up to panic, strategy, even human weakness. Regular lying is a maintenance schedule. It implies the cause can’t survive contact with ordinary facts, so its champions must keep repainting reality like a rotting house.

Gerould, writing in an America increasingly saturated by mass persuasion, treats dishonesty not as an accidental vice but as a diagnostic symptom. The subtext is aimed less at individual liars than at the social ecosystems that require them: movements that demand loyalty over accuracy, leaders who punish inconvenient truths, audiences who prefer comforting myths to messy realities. “Poor” here is not pity; it’s poverty of legitimacy. If truth is your natural ally, you don’t need a permanent propaganda budget.

The sentence also performs its own argument through restraint. No sermon, no grand abstraction, just a crisp conditional that corners the reader: if you find yourself justifying the same distortions again and again, maybe it’s not the messaging that’s failing. Maybe it’s the cause. That’s why the line has such bite in any era of spin. It doesn’t ask you to pick a side; it asks you to audit the cost of defending your side, and whether that cost is paid in truth.