"When it comes to controlling human beings, there is no better instrument than lies. Because you see, humans live by beliefs. And beliefs can be manipulated. The power to manipulate beliefs is the only thing that counts"
About this Quote
Ende is doing something sly here: he frames “lies” not as a moral failure but as a technology - a tool with a clean, almost engineering-like efficiency. The sentence structure is a trapdoor. It starts with the pragmatic language of “instrument,” “controlling,” “better,” then pivots into a deceptively calm explanation of how humans “live by beliefs.” That’s the subtextual punch: he’s not arguing that people are stupid; he’s arguing they’re narrative-dependent. The lie wins because it doesn’t need to overpower reality. It only needs to outcompete it.
The quote’s intent is less to condemn individual liars than to anatomize power. Ende implies that coercion is expensive and unstable, while belief management is cheap and scalable. If you can get people to internalize a story about who they are, what’s dangerous, what’s deserved, you don’t have to police them as much; they begin to police themselves. “The only thing that counts” is an intentionally chilling absolutism - not because Ende believes it’s true in some cosmic sense, but because that’s how power talks when it has stopped pretending to be decent.
Context matters: Ende wrote in postwar Germany, in the long shadow of propaganda’s real-world results, and he built his literary career on fantasy that’s allergic to cynicism for cynicism’s sake. In The Neverending Story and Momo, imagination is both refuge and battleground. This line reads like the adult warning embedded inside a fable: stories can save you, but they can also be weaponized. The scariest lie isn’t the obvious falsehood; it’s the one that colonizes your beliefs so thoroughly it starts to feel like your own idea.
The quote’s intent is less to condemn individual liars than to anatomize power. Ende implies that coercion is expensive and unstable, while belief management is cheap and scalable. If you can get people to internalize a story about who they are, what’s dangerous, what’s deserved, you don’t have to police them as much; they begin to police themselves. “The only thing that counts” is an intentionally chilling absolutism - not because Ende believes it’s true in some cosmic sense, but because that’s how power talks when it has stopped pretending to be decent.
Context matters: Ende wrote in postwar Germany, in the long shadow of propaganda’s real-world results, and he built his literary career on fantasy that’s allergic to cynicism for cynicism’s sake. In The Neverending Story and Momo, imagination is both refuge and battleground. This line reads like the adult warning embedded inside a fable: stories can save you, but they can also be weaponized. The scariest lie isn’t the obvious falsehood; it’s the one that colonizes your beliefs so thoroughly it starts to feel like your own idea.
Quote Details
| Topic | Truth |
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