Quotes About Deception

You tickle trout by gaining their confidence, and then abusing it.

I had an unsettling feeling that I had been completely mistaken as to the very nature of the world I was in, as if every part of it was something wildly different from what it appeared to be - like discovering that your own mother isn't anyone you've ever seen before, but a stranger in a rubber mask.

the lies a man tells tell more truth about him—when analyzed—than does "truth.

The more complicated the law the more opportunity for scoundrels.

When the pope sits on the chamber pot to shit, does he believe in his own infallibility? Does not every imposter occasionally recognize his own hairy, homely humanity? Perhaps not; worn long enough, sometimes the Mask of Authority becomes the man. Even looking in a mirror, he will see the sacred Mask and not his own ordinary human face.

Now you know how I fooled you," he would say. "Try to figure out on your own how your congressmen and clergymen fool you. There is no restraint that isn't self-imposed: you are all absolutely free.

How about the Federal Reserve, then, which has convinced millions that the paper it prints "is" "real" "money"? Prank or fraud? Or perhaps some species of magick that only other sorcerers can understand?

I suggest, following some ideas in semantics and modern logic, that Marilyn Monroe was the most beautiful woman of her time should be considered a self-referential statement. That is, it refers to the nervous system of the speaker. Properly, it should be phrased as Marilyn Monroe seemed the most beautiful woman of her time to me. Stated thusly, it is true (unless we want to be so tricky as to assume the speaker is deliberately deceiving us).

If we consider Clifford Irving's Fake! a fake itself — a fake biography of a fake painter, revealing only what the faker, or fakers, care to reveal, and dumping a great deal of disinformation on us in the process — then we must regard Orson Welles' F For Fake as a fake movie about a fake biography of a fake painter. But perhaps we would more accurately dub it a fake documentary about the impossibility of ever making a "true" documentary.

Almost all cigarette smokers, for instance, have a favorite brand and insist that they cannot be satisfied by any other brand. When blindfolded, however, they cannot distinguish this favorite brand from any other brand. They are not buying the cigarettes but buying the package. The same is true of most beer drinkers: they have a favorite brand, but cannot distinguish it from other brands when blindfolded.

No matter," said Pablo with the dignity of a great magician. "I can fake a Picasso as well as any thief in Europe.

Don't fool around with the masks of reality until you can handle the reality of masks.

Everybody understands that you cannot drink the word water, and yet virtually nobody seems entirely free of semantic delusions entirely comparable to trying to drink the ink-stains that form the word water on this page or the sound waves produced when I say water aloud. If you say, The word is not the thing, everybody agrees placidly; if you watch people, you see that they continue to behave as if something called Sacred really is Sacred and something called Junk really is Junk.

Elmyr said it most bluntly: "Without the Experts, there would be no forgers.

IF YOU DON'T SEE THE FNORD IT CAN'T EAT YOU, DON'T SEE THE FNORD, DON'T SEE THE FNORD . . . I looked back at the paper and still saw the fnords.

She began to think of TVland as, not just a condensed electronic image or ghost of Reality, but a mask that had undergone considerable editing and rewriting to suit those in charge of Reality Selection for the whole society in which the TV existed. She realized that what the TV showed did not represent a simple Xerox of the Real World but a complicated social "game" — or tacit conspiracy — to pretend a certain set of programs contained all of the Real World.

Kind of makes me wonder. George Lucas, as noted earlier, could fake this on film, but I don't know of any existing technology that would fake it in several parts of a "real," "solid" town.

The great Soviet film director, Sergei Eisenstein, once wrote an essay claiming the camera is a liar. What did he mean by that? An old Zen Buddhist riddle asks Who is the Master who makes the grass green?

All appearances seem to be facts, at first, to those to whom they appear.

We never find out how many of the people "framed" by Quinlan actually committed the crimes for which he framed them — just as we never find out the definite position of a quantum particle, or how many Picassos we should really call Elmyrs. Post-modernism does not result from whim, but from growing evidence that we simply do not live in an Aristotelian true/false universe. As UMMO says, we live with a middle (or muddle) excluded by Aristotle.

There was no way to tell, looking at me, that I only had $387 in the bank. Three-piece

Why, she wouldn't even harm a fly...

And here, all along, she'd thought of herself as being so calm, so cool, so composed.

Horror is the 'removal' of masks.