Mendacity

Big Daddy: […] Think of all the lies I got to put up with!—Pretenses! Ain't that mendacity? Having to pretend stuff you don't think or feel or have any idea of?

Mendacity is not a uniform offence: it changes its colour according to the nature and substance of the offence to which it is rendered or endeavoured to be rendered subservient. Mendacity, employed in drawing down upon an innocent head the destroying sword of justice, is murder: murder, encompassed with all its correspondent terror. Mendacity, employed in the obtainment of money, is but depredation. Yet, while predatory mendacity is punished with death, the punishment for the murderous mendacity is in comparison but a flea-bite.

[…] Treating the assertion of the witness as the effect, he [Pierre-Simon Laplace] considers as its two possible causes, the veracity or mendacity of the witness on the particular occasion, that is, the truth or falsity of the fact.

So now the hard Brexiters say, with astonishingly cynical mendacity, that Britain would be better off going it alone.

A shifty or unreliable politician may hide their mendacity behind deceit, fabrication on confabulation, or by rehearsed counter-attack that simply ignores the questions but makes imputations against the other.

And when presidential counsellor Kellyanne Conway coined the phrase “alternative facts” a few days after Trump’s inauguration in early 2017, the mendacity of the incoming administration appeared to be all but official.

The scandalous bronze-lacker age, of hungry animalisms, spiritual impotencies and mendacities, will have to run its course, till the Pit swallow it.

Though the rebels had utterly failed in their purposes, having accomplished nothing but the temporary disabling of two lightly armed vessels, and had retreated before the approach of the only formidable vessel there, they formally, and with a mendacity equalled only by some of their own efforts in that direction, proclaimed that they had "driven out of sight, for a time, the entire hostile fleet," and that the blockade of the port of Charleston was raised.