Dishonesty is the Second-Best Policy
Author: David Mitchell
Release: November 7, 2019
Tagline: And Other Rules to Live By
Publisher: Guardian Faber Publishing
Genre: Humour, Satire
ISBN-10: 1783351969
ISBN-13: 978-1783351961
Declassified by Agent Palmer: Dishonesty and Daggers: Mitchell’s Column Collection is a Delight
Quotes and Lines
Personally, I lie quite often, mainly about whether I am free to attend social events. It’s all because the phrase “I can come but I don’t want to” seems not to be permitted. There’s no way of dressing that sentiment up so that it’s socially acceptable.
(a risky thing for me to say as I metamorphose from whippersnapper to coffin dodger).
These products are “the olfactory equivalent of no-makeup makeup, in which people spend hundreds of hours, and dollars, to look effortless.”
Monopoly is a game that rewards getting rich without making anything. It’s about wealth creation via the aggressive use of ownership. It was ahead of its time.
Product and price are all we want to hear from them – everything else is deception.
After all, the online world isn’t necessarily that convenient for the general public. Granted, it makes it easier to get things delivered, but at the expense of shops where you used to be able to go and buy those things that day. It streamlines correspondence, but often in a way that makes the companies we work for more efficient, rather than improving our own quality of life. It facilitates some chat and fun, but often in environments that are prey to bullying, grooming and fraud, and are an unsatisfactory substitute for real-world human interaction.
They’re still attempting to combine the head-pat of obsessing about how they seem with the stomach-rub of working out how they feel.
Measuring things with cold objectivity – as if that can ever matter as much as a sincere conviction of the heart.
I instinctively don’t like change myself. Obviously, it is intellectually absurd to be either in favour of or against change – it all depends on the change. But, emotionally, we all know which camp we’re in. Everyone’s knee-jerk reaction is either “Ooh, new!” or “Ugh, new!” Then you think about it properly. Or, at least, in the good old days you did.
Just the phrase “not much” in close proximity to the word “million” raises the hackles of those for whom hackle-raising is a major form of exercise.
…a direct consequence of the vulgarity of the rich – of the shocking fact that 99% of the world’s money is in the hands of people possessing 0.0001% of the world’s taste.
I am bewildered by everyone’s conviction that anyone who disagrees with them has been misinformed.