Mendacity is a system that we live in. Liquor is one way out an’ death’s the other.

The line frames “mendacity” (lying, self-deception, social hypocrisy) not as an occasional moral lapse but as an all-encompassing environment—“a system that we live in.” Against that pervasive falsity, the speaker names two exits: intoxication and death. Liquor functions as a temporary, self-administered escape from unbearable truth or from the exhausting performance demanded by society; death is the final, irreversible escape. The blunt pairing suggests a bleak moral economy in which honest living feels nearly impossible, leaving only numbing or annihilation. It also resonates with Williams’s recurring dramatic concern: characters trapped between the need for illusion and the pain of reality.