Life & Wisdom Quote by Anthony Hope

Truth is not a substance you hand over intact; it’s a meaning that has to land. Anthony Hope’s line turns the usual moral posture of honesty inside out: if your audience lacks the frame to interpret you, “telling the truth” can function like misinformation. The sting is in that final “isn’t it?”-a conversational trap that forces the reader to admit how often sincerity backfires. Hope isn’t attacking truth so much as puncturing the self-satisfied idea that truth, once spoken, does its own work.

The subtext is pragmatic, even slightly cynical: communication is co-authored by the listener. A statement can be factually accurate and still socially false if it reliably produces the wrong conclusion. Think of it as an early diagnosis of what we now call context collapse: the same sentence means different things in different rooms, and the speaker doesn’t get to control the downstream uses. The “falsehood” being promoted isn’t in the words themselves; it’s in the predictable misreading they catalyze.

As a late-Victorian/Edwardian novelist with a taste for social gamesmanship, Hope understood how reputation, class codes, and strategic ambiguity govern what can be “heard.” In that world, frankness wasn’t bravery; it could be a blunder. The line doubles as a quiet defense of tact, insinuation, even selective silence-not as cowardice, but as an ethics of consequences. If your truth will be translated into someone else’s lie, Hope suggests, the higher honesty might be choosing a different language, or refusing the stage entirely.