Quotes About Deception

Those who are capable of tyranny are capable of perjury to sustain it.

When the world has once got hold of a lie, it is astonishing how hard it is to get it out of the world. You beat it about the head, till it seems to have given up the ghost, and lo! the next day it is as healthy as ever.

A fool flatters himself, a wise man flatters the fool.

Finally, when all was said and done, the certainty (so often experienced, yet always new) that female charms, the kind that inflame the senses, are no more than kitchen smells: they tease you when you're hungry and disgust you when you've had your fill.

To begin with, I had never done any good deeds; besides, even if I had simply fabricated a few, I would not have enjoyed going on about them.

Egnaro is a secret known to everyone but yourself. It is a country or a city to which you have never been; it is an unknown language. At the same time it is like being cuckolded, or plotted against. It is part of the universe of events which will never wholly reveal itself to you: a conspiracy the barest outline of which, once visible, will gall you forever.

Dreamworlds can maintain themselves only as glimpses. Once the writer transports the reader across the threshold, nothing that was promised can be delivered. What was ominous becomes ordinary; what was bizarre, quotidian. Unless you simply keep upping the ante, piling on the bullshit, the only way to revive things is to switch perspectives as quickly as you can.

Wasn't that the terrible lesson of her life? Who can ever really know anyone?

could be stretching the truth

opposed to behind closed doors. Their psychology. The way they both believed that as long as they told a lie long enough, to as

The way they both believed that as long as they told a lie long enough, to as many people as possible, that it should be believed because they said it. Community

What sinks of iniquity these little villages can be.

For decades, chalk and alum have been added to bread, and burnt corn and peas ground up to make coffee. Vinegar is rendered sharper by the addition of sulphuric acid, arrowroot is added to milk to thicken it, mustard is eked out with flour, strychnine is added to beer for bitterness and green vitriol to encourage a foaming head. And these are but the harmless manipulations.

One man's ugliness can blind another to the world's magic.

Politicians are fools and the games they play are fools games.

gauging the truth of a person merely by looking is a fool's habit.

I think beauty can be a great lie. Sometimes the greatest lie.

With a hologram, like when your teacher is one of them, if you aren't looking right at them, they sometimes seem to be hollow. You see them and suddenly they don't have a face that pokes out. Their faces poke in, their nose and so on, and there is nothing inside them. If you don't look right at them, they can look just like an empty shell.

Even the basic facts of Dmitri Shostakovich's life are often contested, as a glance through the end notes of this book attests. How do we reconstruct the story of someone who lived in a period in which everyone had an excuse to lie, evade, accuse, or keep silent?

M.T. Anderson

Zhukov was stunned. Unlikely as it might seem, most of the Leningrad tank force was made up of motionless decoys, nailed together by Shostakovich's colleagues in the set-design team at the Mariinsky Theater.

How can we ever tell what the world really looks like? On a misty day, even the hills of Elfland are gray and dismal. Look through a gemstone, and the dullest street sparkles. I have had both my eyes put out by goblins, and so, for me, the world is profoundly dark. --- Lemuel of Chartibrande, On the Elfin Sciences & Magical Arts

How can we ever tell what the world really looks like? On a misty day, even the hills of Elfland are gray and dismal. Look through a gemstone, and the dullest street sparkles. I have had both my eyes put out by goblins, and so, for me, the world is profoundly dark.

Men are so simple, and yield so much to necessity, that he who will deceive may always find him that will lend himself to be deceived.