I've heard, learned, and taught this principle to myself and my pupils since I was a young teacher. I had spectacularly good memory back then in my teens. But, conniving, meditating a lie and planning another lie to cover up the first one scared the wits out of me at the start of considering any lie. Of course, I was always found out -- I chose confession at the start... almost. My sour-graping, "I don't care , anyway if I didn't have it" was a bad excuse, too. This yiddish wisdom does carry timeless and tested truth. I am now teaching it to my children and, thankfully, I seem to have the knack for knowing what and how to ask them before they figure out another one to cover up. They always get this cheeky grin on their faces when I demand an eye-to-eye conversation with them. A-ha!
You know this is very true. I didn't understand what you were referring to at first when you made the header that liars need good memories. Then when you explained that it has to do with keeping their story straight i was like they have a valid point. This is how you can usually catch a person in a lie, because they can't remember the whole story they originally gave. I tihnk this is why the police tend to question a suspect more then once asking the same questons just in case they are lying to see if they will keep their story straight. Usually if they are lying they do slip up.
I have alwasy chosen to not tell lies so that I would not have to remember what I said to a person. If I always tell the truth then there is no need to remember what I said because I know the truth and tell the truth. When I think a person is lying to me I make sure I am paying attention to every word they say so that I can remember the lie when they finally tell the truth or change their story.
That's something I grew up hearing also. My grandmother used to say it pretty often and it it is a pretty simple truth. Sometimes, though, I think when people are cross examined and put under pressure their story will begin to get chinks in it as they begin to become confused with why someone keeps asking the same questions over in different ways. People can be led with words away from the truth they know and already told. Particularly people with a strong conscience may begin to question their own selves and what they know or think they know. In the same way, people with a particularly strong conscience will often fail a lie detector test because a question makes them feel guilty about something totally unrelated to a particular line of questioning. I've noticed something personally, too, over the years. Sometimes a good liar can look you in the eyes and lie so easily and well it doesn't show. And sometimes in those same cases if you are not looking at the person at all you can hear the lie in their voice and in their patterns of speech.
A lie is a lie, I don't think that good memory is required in order to be a liar, and I don't think that liars have a good memory, haha.
May I talk of someone without mentioning who he really is? Well, let's call her Charry. She is a chronic liar who makes little lies just for the sake of lying. For instance, she would call me (on landline, there was no cellphone yet that time) just to say hello. So I would ask where she is and she would say in the park. When she puts down the phone, I would dial her number and she is there to answer. So I would ask in her face why she said she was in the park when clearly she was really at home. And she would just chuckle. To add, Charry had that habit of telling tall tales like she has 3 children who are all doctors, one other child in the bank, another is an architect. She's like that and sometimes it is irritating to hear her fooling people whom she meets for the first time. It was really terrible, her lying habits.