Quotes About Deception

It's easier to accept lies by invoking a misguided alibi of tolerance and mutual respect than to live outside the cone of public approval. This is clear in every recent national debate over abortion, marriage, family, sexuality, and rights in general. Many of us are happy to live with half-truths and ambiguity rather than risk being cut out of the herd. The culture of lies thrives on our own complicity, lack of courage, and self-deception. The

Instead of the fellow everyone had always been so fond of—friendly, social, good company, bright, lively—he had developed into a crafty sly masquerader, artful and elusive, presenting a front so different from his real self that they pretended to believe out of sheer embarrassment, as much to save his face as their own.

Each note Cobb wrote contained a rave review of his abilities over a fictitious signature. "Ty Cobb is really tearing up the horsehide in the Tennessee-Alabama League—Jack Smith." Instead of sending off these pieces right away, Ty would drop them in mailboxes at various points along the Steelers' circuit, the better to create the impression of a grassroots movement.

Hall of Famer Rogers Hornsby—who had a much worse reputation than Cobb for being an SOB—once wrote a magazine article called "You've Got to Cheat to Win" in which he contended that cheating occurred in each of 2,259 major league games in which he participated, starting in 1915. (He wasn't even talking about the use of spitballs, which were legal until 1920.) Diving into a pitched ball was perhaps the most common illicit practice;

Every fool aspired to be a knave.

the dangerous practice of stockjobbing, and would divert the genius of the nation from trade and industry. It would hold out a dangerous lure to decoy the unwary to their ruin, by making them part with the earnings of their labour for a prospect of imaginary wealth.

The law is a sort of hocus-pocus science.

You can buy that lie if you want, but if you're working for a bank, you don't study the counterfeit to know the real thing. You study the real thing to know the counterfeit.

And, after all, what is a lie? 'Tis but the truth in masquerade.

Greatest trick ever played on mankind is that somewhere, somebody sold us a bill of goods convincing us that evil ain't real." I

We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We

When a crime is investigated, the explanation that is adopted is not the one that best accounts for all the circumstances, but the one that best serves the purposes of those carrying out the investigation.

Shoddy construction and inadvertent errors, intimidation and actual deception—these are part and parcel of industrial life. No industry is without these problems, just as no valve can be made failure-proof. Normally, the consequences are not catastrophic. They may be, however, if you build systems with catastrophic potential.

Even if they never got anything for it, it was cheap at that price. Without malice aforethought I had given them the best show that was ever staged in their territory since the landing of the Pilgrims! It was easily worth fifteen million bucks to watch me put the thing over.

Webster Spooner carried my bag upstairs and showed me to my room. He said he would keep an eye on the car. I didn't see how he was going to do that from his box. I knew he was a sound sleeper. The woman Ruth had almost had to kill him to get him awake.

If you want to get people to believe something really, really stupid, just stick a number on it.

The justice system can't be totally free of lies and distortion; after all, courts are chock-full of lawyers.

For the most part fraud in the end secures for its companions repentance and shame.

The only way I'm gonna trip over a bitch is if she lies on the floor.

The best way in the world to deceive believers is to cloak a message in religious language and declare that it conveys some new insight from God.

Politics is shit; it corrupts everything it touches...

Tell me something. Why is everyone so determined to believe Wilton is innocent?" Surprised, Davies said, "He's a war hero isn't he? Admired by the King and a friend of the Prince of Wales. He's visited Sandringham, been received by Queen Mary herself! A man like that doesn't go around killing people!" With a wry downturn of his lips, Rutledge silently asked, How did he win his medals, you fool, if not by being so very damned good at killing?

I would give almost anything I have to reverse the course of my life in the last three years…. I have deceived my friends, and I had millions of them.

It's easy to lie with statistics, but it's hard to tell the truth without them.