Friedrich Nietzsche, a German philosopher and poet, once said, “I'm not upset that you lied to me, I'm upset that from now on I can't believe you.” This one, single quote shows what is wrong with lying. Lying is never okay; in most cases, at least. To protect a being’s feelings or life, lying is socially acceptable. On the other hand, being deceitful towards someone for any other reason, is not okay and shouldn’t be socially acceptable; even though, usually, it is. Lying at anytime could set you up to lie again in the future. If you lie, you can be branded as a liar by the rest of society. It can also affect the way people with react to someone, other than yourself, or something. Either way, lying shouldn’t be socially acceptable, no matter how corrupt people think we are.
Lying now could set you up for bigger lies and more lies in the future. Lying is like an addiction. Once you start, you don’t want to stop. Most people don’t stop their lying ritual until they either get caught, or they have harmful consequences for what they have told. When you meet a habitual liar, they will tell you, if you ask them, that they can stop whenever they want, but that isn’t the case. Lying can be like a high. The things you get out of lying make you happy to the point where you just don’t want to quit. If you take Huck, from The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, he is a habitual liar. He lies all the time without any real consequences. For example, when he runs away from his father’s cabin, he does things to he wouldn’t get caught. The things he does pretty much is a lie. It is a deceiving mechanism to drive the person in the wrong way, which is pretty much a lie just not in words. Huck does all this stuff just so he doesn’t get caught and in the end of the book, the worst consequence he gets is having to go live with the widow, which isn’t all that bad. Now, I should remind you that he did lie to the widow too. He would lie and say everything was fine with living with his dad and he would sneak out of her house all the time when he was living with her in the first place. Without any consequences, his lies became bigger and worse. Later on in the book he learned that if he could lie about his gender, or who he was, he could get things he would never be able to get if he was a boy, or Huck Finn. This sets him up for, potentially, robbery. Not of money, but goods. If you take the time he was staying with those girls when their fathers died because the Duke and the King said they were relation, he took the money that was supposed to go to the daughters and he took the shelter and goods that they gave him. If they would have known that he was a run-a-away that was poor, they wouldn’t have been so nice. So, the moral of this is that if you continually lie, you are pretty much setting yourself up to lie in the future.

Lying can also set you up to be branded as a liar by society. Nobody wants to have a bad reputation. It can make you lose job opportunities, have people give you horrible looks, and it can eventually cause a fight. The thing with our society, is that people can be judgemental and cruel. Being a highschool student, I see it first hand. Any rumor that goes around school is essentially a lie. Being a girl in highschool, I have seen many girls give others horrible looks, start fights, and get other people to do the same. In the Scarlet Letter, the father of Pearl doesn’t come out right away, so when he does, he gets a bad reputation. Lying that he wasn’t the father for so many years set him up for being branded as a liar in society. People didn’t look at him the same, which was actually the reason why he didn’t come out and tell people. He didn’t think that the guilt of the lie that he was keeping in would actually affect him. When he did come out, he showed that the guilt had built up inside him and had given him an “A” for adultery on his chest. Society looked at him different and didn’t trust him after that. They thought that if he can’t even come out for his own child, he doesn’t deserve the people’s trust.
Another reason includes the effect it has on the way people will react to someone or something. Going back to the part about high school girls, they do horrible things. Rumors are spread everyday by girls in high school. Everyday, you hear what so and so said and what so and so did. Whether it is true or not, nobody really knows. The person that spreads the rumor has one goal in mind, to hurt someone. The person that spreads the rumor knows that it is going to spread around school and the person it is about is going to feel betrayed by the primary person. But, even with the goal they had, they don’t understand how other people will affect that person. In a personal experience, a rumor went around when I was a 6th grader that I was, in fact, not a girl, but a boy. I don’t know who started it, or if it was really meant to hurt me, but I know that it hurt. Other people believed the rumor and started giving me really mean looks and they said horrible things to me. I will never forget trying to convince everyone that I was a girl and I was not a boy. See, someone lied about me being a boy and the whole school believed it. It didn’t just affect me, but it affect everyone. If it wouldn’t have happened, people wouldn’t have come up with it on their own and wouldn’t have been so cruel to me.
Lying, from any standpoint, should never be socially acceptable. It sets you up to lie in the future, it can get you branded as a liar by society, and it affects how other people react to someone or something. From the famous words of Bruce Lee, “If you don't want to slip up tomorrow, speak the truth today.”