2.    The more intimate the relationship the less you're motivated to lie: This is half-true, but so is its opposite:  The more intimate the relationship; the more motivated you are to lie.  Think about it.  Are you more likely to blurt your honest anger at your partner, or someone you'll never see again?  The person you live with might make you angrier, but you're going to pay a longer and bigger price for expressing it to your partner.  You might vent at a driver who cuts you off, or some technical support person.  You're less likely to vent at your spouse.  The more intimate you are with someone the higher the stakes for both lying and not lying.

3.     Political leaders lie because unlike us, they lack character:  Whether or not they lack character, they are more motivated to lie than those of us traveling in smaller circles, because they have to stay intimate with far more people. Media technology makes us more intimate with politicians than ever.  The stakes go up for them to both tell the truth and lie more effectively. Media captures their every word, so they can't afford to lie blatantly. Still, there are so many soft ways to lie big (lies of omission, vagueness, ambiguity, etc.) and politicians now depend on them more than ever.  We lie about politicians when we say we just want to hear the truth from them.  We're ambivalent about hearing the truth again, because so many truths don't really set us free.

4.     Being honest means you're brave:  Honesty has consequences, welcome and unwelcome, distributed unevenly amongst us.  One man's dreaded, hope-destroying truth is another man's glib obvious honest assessment.  If you've got a better job waiting for you somewhere you can tell your awful boss what you honestly think of him.  When you're in the best job you can ever hope to find, you can't afford to say, let alone face the truth about your awful boss.  And yet there's a tendency for us to ignore stakes and pretend that if we're more honest about something than other people, it's because we are braver.  We lie to ourselves, pretending stakes makes no difference and character makes all the difference in what we're willing to say.

5.    Being honest means your astute:  Also ignoring stakes, we often assume that our ability to call a spade a spade when others can't means we're sharper than they are.  Often though it's simply that we have less at skin in the game than they do. It's easy to spot the blind spots in someone else's thinking. It's harder by far to spot them in our own thinking.  The ability to pinpoint other people's delusions neither proves we're experts on our delusions or on delusions in general.

6.    A half-truth is half as good as a whole truth: This lie is my personal pet peeve. We're inundated with half-truisms, simplistic nostrums that instruct us to always be a certain way or do a certain thing: Always be kind, generous, honest, caring; always hope and follow your dreams; always be honest, etc.  I agree with each of these whole-halfedly, meaning that they're the best policy in all situations except the ones in which they're the worst policy.  Touted as absolute truths, these "Always do X" rules distract us from the crucial questions about when, for example, to be generous and when to set a firm boundary, when to follow your dreams and when to wake up and drop your dreams. To make these unworkable "Always do X" rules appear to work, we end up distorting our definitions of the "X's" involved, saying, for example, "Well I'm always honest, but I'm also always diplomatic too," which leads to subjective self-serving double standards, for example that my blunt blurts are honesty and your blunt blurts are failures to be diplomatic. Our popular half-truths make us think we don't need to cultivate careful discernment. They're a particularly nasty kind of lie.

7.     Hey, we all lie. Lies are no big deal:  Yes, we all lie, but no, it's not all good. Some lies are beneficial, some are benign, and some kill millions and destroy our children's opportunities for satisfying lives.  There should be no escaping the life-long challenge of deciding where a lie will help and where it will hurt.  Generally, we can and should work our way from one half-truth, to its opposite, to the middle way as the answer, to the middle way as the question.  I call it "Hard left; hard right; hard center, hard choices." For example:

Hard left: Always tell the truth. The truth will set you free.
Hard right:  Be kind, tactful and diplomatic, even if it means telling white lies.
Hard center:  The answer is the middle way, be honest and tactful.
Hard choices:  No, that's not the answer, that's the question that I'll have to revisit over and over: When to lie and when not to lie.

8.    Never Lie: If you tell people that you have embraced the life-long question about when to lie, you'll freak them out. So most of us just say or imply that we never lie, which is perhaps the most popular and pervasive of all lies. It's a meta-lie--a lie about lying.  It shows up, for example in the common "No really..." which translates as "I know you don't believe me but believe me you should believe me," which is the position taken both by people being honest and people lying about their lying. 

Lying is sometimes horrific; sometimes a godsend.  Pick your lies carefully.

Full article (Parts 1& 2 combined) here.