"spend whole lifetimes telling lies out of fear"

"We properly think it a worse fate to starve in poverty than to yawn in the midst of luxury.  If the suffering of the world were, as it could be imagined to be, less extreme, if boredom and simple worldly disappointments were our gravest trials, and if, which is harder to conceive, we grieved little at any bereavement and went to death as to sleep, our whole morality might be immensely, perhaps totally different.  That this world is a place of horror must affect every serious artist and thinker, darkening his reflection, ruining his system, sometimes actually driving him mad.  Any seriousness avoids this fact at its peril, and the great ones who have seemed to neglect it have only done so in appearance.  (This is a tautology.)  This is the planet where cancer reigns, where people regularly and automatically and almost without comment die like flies from floods and famine and disease, where people fight each other with hideous weapons to whose effect even nightmares cannot do justice, where men terrify and torture each other and spend whole lifetimes telling lies out of fear.  This is where we live."

-- Iris Murdoch, The Black Prince