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Honesty is the human quality of communicating and acting truthfully, in accordance with a sense of fairness and sincerity. This includes all varieties of communication, both verbal and non-verbal. Honesty implies a lack of deceit. A statement can be strictly true and still be dishonest if the intention of the statement is to deceive its audience. Similarly, a falsehood can be spoken honestly if the speaker actually believes it to be true.
Honesty can be displayed to others, and to oneself (see: self-deception).
Honesty is typically considered virtuous behavior, and has strong positive connotations in most situations.
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Quotations
Honesty is such a lonely word. Everyone is so untrue. Honesty is hardly ever heard. And mostly what I need from you.
— Billy Joel, song lyrics
Honesty is the best poetry.
— Gregory Alan Elliott, Canadian Artist/Designer
Honesty is the best policy; but he who acts on that principle is not an honest man.
All other knowledge is hurtful to him who has not honesty and good-nature.
An honest man's the noblest work of God.
Honesty needs no disguise nor ornament; be plain.
Encyclopedia
Honesty is the human quality of communicating and acting truthfully, in accordance with a sense of fairness and sincerity. This includes all varieties of communication, both verbal and non-verbal. Honesty implies a lack of deceit. A statement can be strictly true and still be dishonest if the intention of the statement is to deceive its audience. Similarly, a falsehood can be spoken honestly if the speaker actually believes it to be true.
Honesty can be displayed to others, and to oneself (see: self-deception).
Honesty is typically considered virtuous behavior, and has strong positive connotations in most situations. A principal reason for this may be that honesty simplifies communication, in that honest statements can be trusted at face value, not necessarily as true, but as genuinely believed. Additionally, honesty helps to form bonds of trust in human relationships.
Conversely, dishonesty can be defined simply as behavior that is performed with intent to deceive. Lying, lying by omission, fraud, and plagiarism are all examples of this sort of behavior. Other examples can be doing one thing
and telling the other, as if you are hiding something.
While there are a great many moral systems, generally speaking, honesty is considered moral and dishonesty is considered immoral. There are several exceptions, such as hedonism, which values honesty only insofar as it improves ones own sense of pleasure, and moral nihilism, which denies the existence of objective morality outright. Additionally, even in moral systems which approve in general of honesty over dishonesty, there are situations in which dishonesty may be preferable. A common example is a "white lie," a lie which is told in a situation where telling the truth would have served no purpose and would have caused pain. While they are dishonest, the motivation behind the deception is the avoidance of suffering, rather than personal gain or the evasion of responsibility common in many other forms of dishonesty, and so white lies often are viewed, if not as completely moral, then at least less immoral than other types of lies.
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