Wit & Attitude Quote by Stanislaw Lec

Lec’s line lands like a businessman’s proverb smuggled into a moral lesson: if honesty pays better, take honesty. The joke is that it isn’t a joke. He drains virtue of its halo and treats it as strategy, exposing how often our ethics are just accounting with nicer vocabulary. “Never lie” sounds like a commandment until the clause that follows quietly yanks the altar out from under it. Truth isn’t defended as sacred; it’s defended as advantageous.

That subtext is quintessential Lec: a poet of aphorisms who wrote under and around the pressures of 20th-century Polish history, where official lies were not a metaphor but an instrument of governance. In that world, “truth” could be both dangerous and, paradoxically, “profitable” in the only currency that mattered - credibility, leverage, survival. The line acknowledges the grim competence of propaganda societies: lies are not always punished, and truths are not always rewarded. Lec doesn’t pretend otherwise. He just asks you to notice the bargain you’re making.

The phrasing also needles the self-image of the liar. We like to imagine deception as clever, daring, even artistic. Lec reduces it to poor market research. If the truth will sell - in court, in politics, in love - lying becomes not only immoral but inefficient. It’s a cynic’s ethical instruction, but it still pressures you toward honesty, not because you’re good, but because you want to win. That’s the sting: he offers integrity as a profit motive and dares you to recognize yourself in it.