Abraham Lincoln |
Abraham Lincoln is credited with having said this:
You can deceive some people all the
time. You can deceive everybody part of the time. But you can't deceive everybody
all the time.
When I was young, if
a politician was caught lying, he must resign, because he had deceived the
people. This was true back then. Famous politicians who resigned during that
time because they had lied included John Profumo, the British minister, in
1963, and Richard Nixon, the US president, in 1974.
This is quite rare now. Today, politicians who resign when they are caught lying are not the rule, but the exception. Many politicians lie whenever they speak, they know that everyone knows that they are lying, but don't care about it. This is an example of the discredit into which the concept of truth has fallen, which was one of the most important criteria in history, not just for politics, but for science and all forms of human thought.