Deception Quotations | Page 3

The cunningest dissimulation is when a man pretends to be caught in the traps others set for him; and a man is never so easily over-reached as when he is contriving to over-reach others.

In love deceit almost always outstrips distrust.

A man is sometimes better off deceived about the one he loves, than undeceived.

Especially difficult when the first and best unconscious move of a dedicated liar is to persuade himself he's sincere. And once he's sincere, all deception vanishes.

He's got a real funky motion that's deceptive to hitters.

Fake it may be, lies and deceptions, but this is the world in which we find ourselves, and here we must make our little lives.

For our exhortation was not of deceit, nor of uncleanness, nor in guile: / But as we were allowed of God to be put in trust with the gospel, even so we speak; not as pleasing men, but God, which trieth our hearts.

Life deceives everyone except the individual who doesn't contemplate it, the individual who demands nothing from it, the individual who serenely accepts its few gifts and serenely makes the most of them.

Machiavelli says that if as a ruler you accept that your every action must pass moral scrutiny, you will without fail be defeated by an opponent who submits to no such moral test. To hold on to power, you have not only to master the crafts of deception and treachery but to be prepared to use them where necessary.

Even good people are obliged to deceive.

Deceive not thy physician, confessor, nor lawyer.

Cosmologies are made up of small snippets of physical reality that have been remodeled by society into vast cosmic deceptions.

The gift of words is the gift of deception and illusion.

We never deceive people to benefit them, for knavery is a compound of wickedness and falsehood.

An economy where advertisers thrive while journalists and artists struggle, reflects the values of a society more interested in deception and manipulation than in truth and beauty

I'm really interested in self-deception. Really interested in how people live in bubble universes. How people can fail to see the seemingly obvious.

If you asked me what makes the world go round, I would say self-deception. Self-deception allows us to create a consistent narrative for ourselves that we actually believe. I’m not saying that the truth doesn’t matter. It does. But self-deception is how we survive.

The words of the double-tongued are as if they were harmless, but they reach even to the inner part of the bowels. Praise be to the Lord, who distinguishes our cause and delivers us from the unjust and deceitful man.

My version of an Irish exit has an air of deception to it, because it includes my asking loudly, “Where’s the bathroom?” and making theatrical looking-around gestures like a lost foreign tourist. But then, instead of finding the bathroom, I sneakily grab my coat and leave.

With extramarital courtship, the deception was prolonged where it had been ephemeral, necessary where it had been frivolous, conspiratorial where it had been lonely.

The fundamental deception of Satan is the lie that obedience can never bring happiness.

When a woman is undisguisedly bad, then indeed she is good. [Comparatively speaking, as she at least lacks deception.]

It is more tolerable to be refused than deceived.

Cats are possessed of a shy, retiring nature, cajoling, haughty, and capricious, difficult to fathom. They reveal themselves only to certain favored individuals, and are repelled by the faintest suggestion of insult or even by the most trifling deception.

Our myths are so many, our vision so dim, our self-deception so deep and our smugness so gross that scarcely any way now remains of reporting the American Century except from behind the billboards ...

Will you walk into my parlour? Said the spider to a fly: '"Tis the prettiest little parlour That ever you did spy.

the old fellow seemed to spot deceit as if it reeked like a goat.

Disillusionment means having no more misconceptions, false impressions, and false judgments in life; it means being free from these deceptions. Refusing to be disillusioned is the cause of much of the suffering of human life.

A theme is always necessary, a plain, simple, unadorned theme to confuse the ignorant.

The human face is a weak guarantee; yet it deserves some consideration. And if I had to whip the wicked, I would do so more severely to those who belied and betrayed the promises that nature had implanted on their brows; I would punish malice more harshly when it was hidden under a kindly appearance.

Our capacity for self-deception has no known limits

Because if one has an image, however dim and romantic, of a journey's end, one may, in the end, surely reach it, after no matter how many detours and deceptions and abandonings of hope. And hope could never have been entirely abandoned, even in the worst days.

What one has most to work and struggle for in painting is to do the work with a great amount of labour and sweat in such a way that it may afterward appear, however much it was laboured upon, to have been done almost quickly and almost without any labour, and very easily, although it was not.

Belief is a deception you play upon yourself....

When your art fails, make better art.

Deceit and violence - these are the two forms of deliberate assault on human beings.

Some people are so much afraid of being deceived, that they never venture to trust; like misers, their avarice destroys their gain.

If you alter or obscure the Biblical portrait of God in order to attract converts, you don't get converts to God, you get converts to an illusion. This is not evangelism, but deception.

Perhaps there are only a few women who experience without deception the overwhelming intoxication of the senses which they expectfrom their encounters with men, which they feel bound to expect because of the fuss made about it in novels, written by men.

Smuggle out the truth, pass it through all the obstacles that its enemies fabricate; multiply, spread by all means possible her message so that she may triumph; through zeal and civic action counterbalance the influence of money and the machinations lavished on the propagation of deception. That, in my opinion, is the most useful activity and the most sacred duty of pure patriotism.

Deceit is a kind of garment that conceals the soul. It might even be compared to a whole wardrobe, so many are its guises.

He who tries to protect himself from deception is often cheated, even when most on his guard.

I am the scroll of the poet behind which samurai swords are being sharpened.

To combat depression by a forced credit expansion is to attempt to cure the evil by the very means which brought it about; because we are suffering from a misdirection of production, we want to create further misdirection -- a procedure which can only lead to a much more severe crisis as soon as the credit expansion comes to an end.

The history of government management of money has, except for a few short happy periods, been one of incessant fraud and deception.

To create conditions in which competition will be as effective as possible, to prevent fraud and deception, to break up monopolies- these tasks provide a wide and unquestioned field for state activity.

Truth lives on in the midst of deception....

The endless, agonizing recycling of what might have been, soon followed by a litany of rationalizations and self-deceptions as you struggle to reconcile the void between the person you want to be and the person you fear you are..

Everyone is born sincere and dies deceivers.

The history of institutions is often a history of deception and illusions; for their virtue depends on the ideas that produce and on the spirit that preserves them, and the form may remain unaltered when the substance has passed away.

An offended heart is the breeding ground of deception.

The truth is there is no $1 billion. This amendment is about deception.

This is more of the deceit they have put together. They are trying to do stuff heavy handed and bamboozle the city.

Judgment consists not in seeing through deceptions and evil intentions, but in being able to awaken the decency dormant in every person.

The only safety is in the middle of total misunderstanding and deception.

The game plan was to establish the run and take advantage of the misdirection and deception of the double-wing, but that didn't work. So we started throwing the ball, and we felt like we were kind of picking apart their secondary, so we started going with it.

If, after a rigid examination, it be found an imposition, it should be extensively published to the world as such; the evidences and arguments on which the imposture was detected, should be clearly and logically stated, that those who have been sincerely yet unfortunately deceived, may perceive the nature of the deception and be reclaimed, and that those who continue to publish the delusion, may be exposed and silenced....

The consequences of President Johnsons campaign of deliberate deception regarding Vietnam could hardly have been more catastrophic for the nation, the military, the president, his party, and the presidency itself.

The day for deception is over. The day for the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth has come,

This, the language of deception, we both understand. We were born to it, along with the curses.

A marriage based on full confidence, based on complete and unqualified frankness on both sides; they are not keeping anything back; there's no deception underneath it all. If I might so put it, it's an agreement for the mutual forgiveness of sin.

The craftiest trickery are too short and ragged a cloak to cover a bad heart.

And here and now we must insist again that fidelity, honor, and love of country demand untrammeled debate and open dissent. At no time is that truer than in the midst of a war rooted in deceit and justified by continuing deception.

Drawing is deception.

Without some dissimulation no business can be carried on at all.

Euphemisms, like fashions, have their day and pass, perhaps to return at another time. Like the guests at a masquerade ball, they enjoy social approval only so long as they retain the capacity for deception.

You can hide as cleverly as you like, but in the final analysis mimicry is deception, pure and simple. It doesn't solve a thing.

If, however, a government refrains from regulations and allows matters to take their course, essential commodities soon attain a level of price out of the reach of all but the rich, the worthlessness of the money becomes apparent, and the fraud upon the public can be concealed no longer.

In itself, the practice of deception is not particularly exacting; it is a matter of experience, of professional expertise, it is a facility most of us can acquire.

The monster likes to talk; he jumps into your head and opens your mouth, making it spout your deepest darkest deceptions. Making you say all the things you'd rather not say, at least not in mixed company." (Ellen Hopkins)

Very often, I'm part of the deception because the way I play things is that I want you to be able to look back and go, "Oh, my god, I didn't see that at the time, but now it all makes sense," and you want to watch it a second time with the benefit of hindsight.

We tend to tell strangers what we think will make us sound good. I myself, to my utter amazement, informed a telephone pollster that I exercised regularly, a bare-faced lie.

The more skillful the performance of false cheer, the more pleasing the effect is upon one's public and on that private audience to whom one owes even more.

Acting is a form of deception, and actors can mesmerize themselves almost as easily as an audience.

Rationalization may be defined as self-deception by reasoning.

If deceiving the eye were the only business of the art... the minute painter would be more apt to succeed. But it is not the eye, it is the mind which the painter of genius desires to address.

An ideology is a complex of ideas or notions which represents itself to the thinker as an absolute truth for the interpretation of the world and his situation within it; it leads the thinker to accomplish an act of self-deception for the purpose of justification, obfuscation and evasion in some sense or other to his advantage.

I'd sacrificed true love and a popped cherry to the god of deception and hormones." - Zoey Redbird (Ch 24)

She's easy to lead around, a shiny present here, a pretty compliment there, and you have true love and a popped cherry sacrificed to the god of deception and hormones. Young girls are so ridiculous--so predictably easy.

If any man thinks to swindle God, he is wrong.

For of all hard things to bear and grin, / The hardest is knowing you're taken in.

Truth often finds its way to the mind close muffled in robes of sleep, and then speaks with uncompromising directness of matters in regard to which we practise an unconscious self-deception during our waking moments.

Self-deception is sometimes as necessary a tool as a crowbar.

Beauty is a mute deception.

Deception is mostly a game we play with ourselves.

It wasn't a deception: all lovers live on partial knowledge.

If your team is filled with people who work for the company, you'll soon be defeated by tribes of people who work for a cause.

Courage is the willingness to speak the truth about what you see and to own what you say.

the constant shower of the sun's mane erases the footprints on thin ice do not fear deception for the world lies atop deception ~Toushiro Hitsugaya

Self-deception can be more comforting than self-knowledge. We like to fool ourselves.

If your educe sculpture to the flat plane of the temporal experience of the work. (...) the experience of the work is inseparable from the place in which the work resides. Apart from that condition, any experience of the work is a deception.

Confidence, once lost or betrayed, can never be restored again to the same measure; and we learn too late in life that our acts of deception are irrevocable - they may be forgiven, but they cannot be forgotten by their victims.

Messin with me, is like wearing cheese underwear down rat alley. Ollie Chandler in Deception

Magic things are fond of deceptions.

As in everything else, I must start with myself. That is: in all circumstances try to be decent, just, tolerant, and understanding, and at the same time try to resist corruption and deception. In other words, I must do my utmost to act in harmony with my conscience and my better self.

To many men much-wandering hope comes as a boon, but to many others it is the deception of vain desires.

The instinct for self-deception in human beings makes them try to banish from their minds dangers of which at bottom they are perfectly aware by declaring them non-existent.

Sometimes terror and pain are not the best levers; deception, when it works, is the most elegant and the least expensive manipulation of all.

Governments are based pincipally on force and deception. Democratic governments are based chiefly on deception, other governments on force. And democratic governments, if you get too uppity, give up on the deception and resort to brute force, as a lot of us found out in the sixites. Those who didn't find out in the sixites will find out in the near future because we're going to have a rerun.

It may be that the deep necessity of art is the examination of individual's and society's self-deception.