Quotes About Deception

It seemed as if everyone I met knew me, and as if everyone were playing an elaborate double-game.

I still thought you might be behind the whole thing. You or Brand. I had it narrowed down that far. I thought it might even be the two of you together-especially with him struggling to bring you back.

By looking at his face, I could no more tell whether he was lying, in whole or in part, than I could learn by scrutinizing the Jack of, say, Diamonds.

I would have taken genuine delight in looking helpless while actually pulling the strings that made all the others dance. Any of us would, though. We all have our motives, our ambitions.

All scheming princes must keep a few secrets.

We spend so much time lying to one another that I decided it would be amusing to say what I really felt. Just to see whether anyone noticed.

Don't you see, said Father, that you are confusing fiction with facts, fiction does not create facts, fiction can come from facts, it can grow out of facts by compounding, transposing, augmenting, diminishing, or altering them in any way; but you must not confuse cause and effect, you must not confuse what really happened with what the story says happened, you must not lose your grasp on reality, that way madness lies.

A photograph is always invisible, it is not it that we see.

Painting can feign reality without having seen it. Discourse combines signs which have referents, of course, but these referents can be and are most often 'chimeras.

mieux valent les leurres de la subjectivité que les impostures de l'objectivité.

Mais à nous, qui ne sommes ni des chevaliers de la foi ni des surhommes, il ne reste, si je puis dire, qu'à tricher avec la langue, qu'à tricher la langue. Cette tricherie salutaire, cette esquive, ce leurre magnifique, qui permet d'entendre la langue hors-pouvoir, dans la splendeur d'une révolution permanente du langage, je l'appelle pour ma part : littérature.

Operation Margarine

Mirabeau, the French revolutionary politician, once observed of Talleyrand that he "would sell his soul for money and he would be right, for he would be exchanging dung for gold."32 Napoleon expressed this sentiment more concisely, calling Talleyrand "a pile of shit in a silk stocking.

In the next poem, Hamilton has suddenly metamorphosed into a jaded rake, who begins with a shocking, Swiftian opening line: 'Celia's an artful little slut.

The world of politics was filled with duplicitous people and Grant was poorly equipped to spot them, remaining an easy victim for crooked men. "They studied Grant, some of them, as the shoemaker measures the foot of his customer," wrote George Hoar.

They came up with a way to create the illusion that all shippers paid the identical posted rates while Standard Oil was compensated secretly through an accounting gimmick.

It is almost inconceivable that he did not suspect at moments that Archbold had learned some of his tricks from Senior.

Os sofismas do fazendeiro seriam "desmascarados; suas objeções, refutadas; seus artifícios, detectados; e suas galhofas, ridicularizadas".

As always, he presented a cordial façade that disarmed people

Having never dealt with Frank, Slaght naively trusted him.

He was now a master puppeteer, adroitly manipulating his marionettes, with the strings artfully concealed.

While Rockefeller made it seem as if such shenanigans occurred far from his sphere, he was fully briefed by Thompson, who liked to boast of his maneuvers.

Machiavellian

WHEN I WAS VERY YOUNG, Papa used to tell me that words fly on wild winds from the mouths of sly people. When the winds pick up, he said, sand blows into your ears and bites your eyes. Storms build overhead like a lake with a spout, but you can't see or hear. Only when you are safely sheltered, Papa said, can you tell which way the wind is blowing. Only from the calm, he said, can you see how to protect yourself from trouble.