Quotes About Deception

Verbal argument has one vital use in the realm of power: To distract and cover your tracks when you are practicing deception or are caught in a lie. In such cases it is to your advantage to argue with all the conviction you can muster. Draw the other person into an argument to distract them from your deceptive move.

Knowing about your rival is critical. Use spies to gather valuable information that will keep you a step ahead. Better still: Play the spy yourself. In polite social encounters, learn to probe. Ask indirect questions to get people to reveal their weaknesses and intentions. There is no occasion that is not an opportunity for artful spying.

Hide your intentions not by closing up (with the risk of appearing secretive, and making people suspicious) but by talking endlessly about your desires and goals—just not your real ones.

An emphatic trait often conceals it's opposite

To be a brilliant exploiter of talent your position must be unshakable, or you will be accused of deception.

You often do not know your friends as well as you imagine. Friends often agree on things in order to avoid an argument. They cover up their unpleasant qualities so as to not offend each other. They laugh extra hard at each other's jokes. Since honesty rarely strengthens friendship, you may never know how a friend truly feels. Friends will say that they love your poetry, adore your music, envy your taste of clothes-- maybe they mean it, often they do not.

A good strategy to utilize is to see through the front they project. They inevitably try to cast a larger-than-life image, a mythic, intimidating quality; but in fact they are all too human, full of the same insecurities and weaknesses we all possess. Try to recognize these very human traits and demythologize them.

Never make it too clear what you are doing or about to do.

If people were rational and morally superior, the world would be suffused with goodness and peace. We know, however, the reality, and so some people, perhaps all of us, are merely deceiving ourselves.

Timidity has no place in the realm of power; you will often benefit, however, by being able to feign it. At that point, of course, it is no longer timidity but an offensive weapon: You are luring people in with your show of shyness, all the better to pounce on them boldly later.

As Winston Churchill said, "Truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies.

The essence of deception is distraction.

It is a deadly but common misperception to believe that by displaying and vaunting your gifts and talents, you are winning the master's affection.

The origin of the word "seduction" is the Latin for "to lead astray.")

These types, for example, will often display their weakness and lack of power as a kind of moral virtue. But true powerlessness, without any motive of self-interest, would not publicize its weakness to gain sympathy or respect. Making a show of one's weakness is actually a very effective strategy, subtle and deceptive, in the game of power

Genuinely innocent people may still be playing for power, and are often horribly effective at the game, since they are not hindered by reflection. Once again, those who make a show or display of innocence are the least innocent of all.

Truth was like any other material necessary for the making of war: it had to be beaten and bent and cut into the required shape.

In the end, the only safe place to put a Trojan horse is outside your walls.

A crock of shit," Rick had called it. But actually this was worse. Shit, to quote Gore Vidal, has its own integrity. This was a crock of nothing.

What she needed was someone who would take her for the whole night. Someone decent and respectable, with an apartment of his own. But how could you ever judge what men were really like? It was the young ones with the swaggering walks and the loud mouths who ended up bursting into tears and showing you pictures of their girlfriends. It was the bespectacled bankers and lawyers who liked to knock you around.

I lay aside the papers. Really, it is beyond hypocrisy; it is beyond even lying: it has become a psychosis.

The Hitler diaries affair is a monument to the cock-up theory of history.

What do you do,' he said, 'if you devote your life to discovering criminals, and it gradually occurs to you that the real criminals are the people you work for?

Cosa si può fare, disse, se si dedica la vita a smascherare i criminali, e a poco a poco ci si accorge che i veri criminali sono quelli per cui si lavora? Cosa si può fare quando tutti ti dicono di non preoccuparti perché tanto non ci puoi fare niente ed è successo molto tempo fa? Adesso Charlie lo guardava in un modo diverso. Immagino che si perda la ragione. Oppure può succedere di peggio. La si può trovare.