Quotes About Deception

I don't have any illusions that Hollywood is a place of integrity.

As any magician knows, it is not the smoke and mirrors that trick people; it is that the human mind makes assumptions and misunderstands them as truths.

Deception takes commitment, vigilance, and a very good memory. To keep the truth buried, you must tend to it. For years and years, my job was to pile on sand - fistfuls, shovelfuls, bucketfuls, whatever the moment necessitated - in an effort to keep my mother's secret buried.

A buried truth, that's all a lie really is.

We all know the adage that one lie begets the next. Deception takes commitment, vigilance, and a very good memory. To keep the truth buried, you must tend to it.

The liar has many friends, and leads an existence of great loneliness.

Lies are usually attempts to make everything simpler — for the liar — than it really is, or ought to be. In lying to others we end up lying to ourselves. We deny the importance of an event, or a person, and thus deprive ourselves of a part of our lives. Or we use one piece of the past or present to screen out another. Thus we lose faith even within our own lives.

If you're truly depicting human behavior in an honest way, it is a lot of miscommunication, non-communication, paranoia, passive aggressiveness. People don't finish sentences. They don't say what they mean. They lie to each other. They take credit for things that are actually other people's ideas.

It is needless to say that women make the most patient as well as the most dangerous pickpockets.

To Sun-tzu and the ancient Chinese, doing something extraordinary had little effect without a setup of something ordinary. You had to mix the two - to fix your opponent's expectations with some banal, ordinary maneuver, a comfortable pattern that they would then expect you to follow.

Hell is paved with good samaritans.

Politics are the same old thing. We elect people, we put them in office, and guess what they do? They sell us out. They sell us down the river, and we pay for it.

Fraud is the homage that force pays to reason.

We grew up during the 'peace and love' of the 1960s, only to discover that there are wars everywhere, and love and romance is a con.

Everything isn't always going to be peaches and cream. If it is, then it's fake.

It's all a sham: I have seen, and I know firsthand, indeed from my own pen, how the organized Right has sabotaged not only journalism but also democracy and truth.

For all the good that Alok Nath had done, being perceived as a father figure, the fact that he was hitting on a girl, who was playing his daughter, made me almost want to throw up.

Mr. Burns comes out and flips cigar ashes on his shoes, and makes up about 90 percent of what you hear.

Facts matter not at all. Perception is everything. It's certainty.

Perception is not always reality.

I've said before that the common perception that all good actors should be good liars is exactly the opposite; only bad actors lie when they act.

Perception's not reality.

I understand the difference between perception and reality.

Our absolutes should always be hypothesis. They should never be confirmed as fact because everything that we construct through our perceptions, through our memories, is so corruptible. The skills that I have can really display that.