Daily Inspiration Quote by William Goldman

The line lands like a pledge of honor, then immediately undercuts itself with the faint stink of performance. "Men of action" is a self-mythologizing label: it frames identity not around what you believe, but what you do. That’s a classic Goldman move, because action is where characters want moral clarity and where stories promise payoff. But the comma is doing the real work. "Lies do not become us" isn’t a moral statement so much as a style note. Not "lying is wrong" - "lying doesn’t suit our brand."

Goldman, as a novelist and screenwriter steeped in adventure and genre machinery, understood that virtue in tales often functions as costume. Heroes announce codes to make the audience relax; the plot then tests how elastic those codes are. The phrasing is faintly old-world, almost chivalric, which makes it perfect for characters trying to sound clean while operating in messy circumstances. It invites the suspicion that they’re already lying, or that they’re about to justify a lie as tactical necessity.

The subtext: we want to be seen as straight shooters, because legitimacy is power. If you’re a "man of action", your authority comes from decisiveness; admitting deceit introduces hesitation, calculation, politics - the very things action heroes pretend to rise above. So the quote doubles as a manipulation of the listener: trust us because we act, and because we claim we don’t need the cheap tools other people use.

In Goldman’s world, that’s both a romantic aspiration and a punchline. The sentence is a flag planted on shaky ground, daring the story to knock it over.