On the subject of noble lies:

No: at all costs, it is to be prayed by all men that shams may cease. Good heavens, to what depths have we got, when this to many a man seems strange! Yet strange to many a man it does seem; and to many a solid Englishman, wholesomely digesting his pudding among what are called the cultivated classes, it seems strange exceedingly; a mad ignorant notion, quite heterodox, and big with mere ruin. He has been used to decent forms long since fallen empty of meaning, to plausible modes, solemnities grown ceremonial,--what you in your iconoclast humour call shams,—all his life long; never heard that there was any harm in them, that there was any getting-on without them.

Thomas Carlyle--The Latter-Day Pamphlets