It means that people lie to themselves more than anyone else has lied to them.
A Benjamin Franklin wisdom, it means to say that most of us tell ourselves a hundred lies for every lie that is told to us.
Franklin published The Poor Richard's Almanack from 1732-1758. He wrote it under the pseudonym of "Poor Richard" or "Richard Saunders".
The book, filled with proverbs preaching industry and prudence, was published continuously for 25 years and became one of the most popular publications in colonial America, selling an average of 10,000 copies a year.
A psychological term known as “cognitive dissonance” is behind the reason why we lie to ourselves and tell ourselves untruths.
The term cognitive dissonance was coined by psychologist Leon Festinger in 1954 to describe “the feeling of psychological discomfort produced by the combined presence of two thoughts that do not follow from one another.
Festinger proposed that the greater the discomfort, the greater the desire to reduce the dissonance of the two cognitive elements” (Harmon-Jones & Mills, 1999).
Dissonance theory suggests that if individuals act in ways that contradict their beliefs, then they typically will change their beliefs to align with their actions (or vice-a-versa).