Quotes About Deception

Winston Churchill once said, 'In wartime, truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies.

Professor Bhegad gasped. "Massa treachery . . . Torquin's driving . . . not sure which is worse.

He was wrong. I had managed to take everything apart. I was no Tailor. I was a Killer.

They were actually going to keep all four of us together. Tinker, Tailor, Sailor, Traitor.

We say, "That's a very interesting idea," when we have no intention of taking the idea seriously.

Thought presents itself (stands in front) of us and pretends that it does not represent.

James Reston, Jr.: You know the first and greatest sin of the deception of television is that it simplifies; it diminishes, great complex ideas, stretches of time; whole careers become reduced to a single snapshot.

but the easiest way isn't necessarily the true one.

I've never been a good liar, except to myself.

The truth is rarely as liberating as people would have us believe; it often binds more than it frees.

It's an odd thing is a professional gone bad. They talk about bent coppers, but what about bent lawyers, bent accountants, bent doctors? If push came to shove, would you expect one crooked businessman to stick up for another?

hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue

Everything here is a lie, Rose said. Just because you saw it doesn't mean it really happened. Tom nodded. He was curiously reluctant to take up this hope she offered. If he reached out, it might bite his hand.

Evil is a convenient fiction.

The first lie of a map—also the first lie of fiction—is that it is the truth.

the startling line in J. M. Barrie's Peter Pan, where Captain Hook is described: "The man isn't wholly evil; he has a thesaurus in his cabin.

Ignoring the vices of our friends and the virtues of our enemies sets us up for nasty surprises.

Wrinkled women lifting their faces, chasing their youth. Fat men sucking in bellies. Poor folks putting on airs. Sinners acting like saints. All of us keeping pace with our companions, stepping lively in this dance of deceit.

dolphins are not the benevolent mammals we'd like them to be; those beaming faces hide the minds of assassins.

So I go to college and I'm standing there looking in the microscope. And there aren't even any paramecia in there at all, 'cause the slide moved. And the instruction is, 'Draw what you see.' And I realize that there's nothing there, nothing at all. But I can't consciously face the fact that this is a symbol of my whole projected four years there, I'm drawing pictures of things that -

A brand-new tape recorder, completely worn out. Bought with funny money that the store is willing to accept. Worthless money, worthless article purchased; it has a sort of logic to it.

Owning and maintaining a fraud had a way of gradually demoralizing one.

Any given man sees only a tiny portion of the total truth, and very often, in fact almost perpetually, he deliberately deceives himself about that little precious fragment as well. A portion of him turns against him and acts like another person, defeating him from inside. A man inside a man. Which is no man at all.

Fat realized that one of two possibilities existed and only two; either Dr. Stone was totally insane – not just insane but totally so – or else in an artful, professional fashion he had gotten Fat to talk; he had drawn Fat out and now knew that Fat was totally insane.