Quotes About Deception

The difference between reality and unreality is that reality has so little to recommend it.

To obfuscate the reconstruction of the effect - when a magician is fooled by another magician doing magic. In my career that's not been the major passion, but it's been the passion of a number of my mentors. The crowning achievement for them would be to create magic good enough to fool other magicians.

Since you knew they was goin' to cheat you anyway, I recorded under any name with all of 'em.

We did not get any money from the early records. It was all taken by crooked managers. It is just a gangster's paradise.

Honest people remember stories in the order of emotional prominence, but liars will recount a story in chronological order. Memory rarely works that way.

Lying is like alcoholism. You are always recovering.

I used to call him Pinocchio on the sets. Pinocchio's nose would turn red if he lied. Aamir would turn red-faced if he had to tell a lie.

The personal appearances and red carpet events are very glitzy, but it's a bit false.

I did a film a couple years ago called 'Who Is Clark Rockefeller?' It was a role that I was really proud of that I wish more people could go back and rediscover.

You might hold an ethical position that it's wrong to lie, but if you have plans for a war in Iraq, and you want to keep them secret for practical reasons - to reduce casualties, perhaps - and someone asks you about those plans, you may need to lie for a 'good' outcome.

False thinking and false ideologies, dressed in the most pleasing forms, quietly - almost without our knowing it - seek to reduce our moral defenses and to captivate our minds. They entice with bright promises of security, cradle-to-grave guarantees of many kinds.

So, a flop is basically tricking the referee into thinking somebody fouled you or maybe elbowed you in the face.

In the classic 70s episodes, Columbo is rarely seen on his own. We typically do not see Columbo 'for himself,' only for the criminal, leaving the possibility that the entire Columbo persona - his shambling manner, his absent mindedness, even his references to his wife - may all be a performance designed to disarm the murderer.

My mother caught my ex-wife and sister's husband red handed, in compromising situations many times.

I remember reading the script for 'Dangerous Liaisons' and thinking that I could quite happily spend the rest of my life watching this film; the story and the writing were so wonderful.

I have a really hard time abiding by falsehoods being left in place.

I would have thought technology would have made it harder to do what I did.

When we think of misdirection, we think of something as looking off to the side when, actually, the things right in front of us are often the hardest to see: the things that you look at every day that you're blinded to.

When you think you're a really good person, you're actually capable of doing some real harm to people, either knowingly or unknowingly. It's the big little lie that we all live in.

There is no such thing as a harmless truth.

I love things that are harsh and things that are too loud. And I love lulling people into a false sense of security. That's life.

I hate careless flattery, the kind that exhausts you in your efforts to believe it.

Everybody has the ability to be manipulative, to be hateful and deceitful.

Gray hats are the ones who think they're doing good, but they're not. You learn that when the FBI shows up on your doorstep.