Quotes About Betrayal

Often people become our friend or follower with an undercurrent of resentment in our having more success than they have. They secretly desire the opportunity to take us down a notch; they have a nose for any misstep on our part they can exploit.

Being a successful Hollywood actress may be challenging, but little did I know that the very body that had always been my calling card would betray me.

President Ford was taken for a ride by his predecessor, whom he unpardonably pardoned; Jimmy Carter was also taken for a ride, but by his successor, Ronald Reagan, over the return of the Iran hostages.

I'll think I have a few wonderful friends and all of a sudden, ooh, here it comes. They do a lot of things. They talk about you to the press, to their friends, tell stories, and you know, it's disappointing.

I was blackballed by the studios when I sued by stepfather.

Patriotism in America, as I understand it, is a matter of suffering, when the country fails to live up to its promises, or actively betrays them.

So now my prayer is this: You, my own deep soul, trust me. I will not betray you. My blood is alive with many voices telling me I am made of longing. — Rainer Maria Rilke, from "Dann bete du, wie es dich dieser Iehrt," Rilke's Book of Hours: Love Poems to God , trans. Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy (Riverhead Books, 1996)

I could feel their eyes, saw them all and saw too the time when they would know that my prospects were ended and saw already the contempt they'd feel for me, a college man who had lost his prospects and pride. I could see it all and I knew that even the officials and the older men would despise me as though, somehow, in losing my place in Bledsoe's world I had betrayed them . . . I saw it as they looked at my overalls.

I could see it now, see it clearly and in growing magnitude. It was not suicide, but murder. The committee had planned it.

An Eastern poet, Ali Ben Abu Taleb, writes with sad truth, — He who has a thousand friends has not a friend to spare, And he who has one enemy shall meet him everywhere.

We do not quite forgive a giver. The hand that feeds us is in some danger of being bitten.

That's life for you, said MacDunn. Someone always waiting for someone who never comes home. Always someone loving some thing more than that thing loves them. And after a while you want to destroy whatever that thing is, so it can't hurt you no more.

They whispered to Caesar that he was mortal, then sold daggers at half-price in the grand March sale.

I was doing a terrible thing in using the very books you clung to, to rebut you on every hand, on every point! What traitors books can be! You think they're backing you up, and then they turn on you. Others can use them, too, and there you are, lost in the middle of the moor, in a great welter of nouns and verbs and adjectives.

Those are not my friends, the ones who got me to tear the strips apart and so tear my own life down the middle; they are my enemies.

There are billions of us and that's too many. Nobody knows anyone. Strangers come and violate you. Strangers come and cut your heart out. Strangers come and take your blood.

What traitors books can be! You think they're backing you up, and they turn on you. Others can use them, too, and there you are, lost in the middle of the moor, in a great welter of nouns and verbs and adjectives.

And suddenly she was so strange he couldn't believe he knew her at all. He was in someone else's house, like those other jokes people told of the gentleman, drunk, coming home late late at night, unlocking the wrong door, entering a wrong room, and bedding with a stranger and getting up early and going to work and neither of them the wiser.

She's nothing to me; she shouldn't have had books. It was her responsibility, she should've thought of that. I hate her. She's got you going and next thing you know we'll be out, no house, no job, nothing.

Arthur Koestler's Darkness at Noon

It seems that the savage autocracy, any more than the divine democracy, does not limit its diet exclusively to the bodies of its enemies. It devours its friends and servants as well.

There is no occupation that fails a man more completely than that of a secret agent of police. It's like your horse suddenly falling dead under you in the midst of an uninhabited and thirsty plain.

I did not betray Mr. Kurtz--it was ordered I should never betray him--it was written I should be loyal to the nightmare of my choice. I was anxious to deal with this shadow by myself alone,--and to this day I don't know why I was so jealous of sharing with anyone the peculiar blackness of that experience.

Brutus and Cassius howl in Hell together