Quotes About Deception

Power is not only what you have but what the enemy thinks you have.

I never yet touched a fig leaf that didn't turn into a price tag.

A man may say, "From now on I'm going to speak the truth." But the truth hears him and runs away and hides before he's even done speaking.

The worst of all deceptions is self-deception.

A great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep.

Tony Montana I always tell the truth. Even when I lie.

Max always mumbles; not in a shy way, but rather as if he's telling you what it will cost to take out your worst enemy, or how much you'd have to pay to rig a horse race.

We live in a world of evaluations, assessments, and measurements, but Jesus turns his gaze deeper because he knows that what is measurable can be faked.

Deceit finds its way into every religion, including Christianity. In fact, deceit was at work from the very beginning. Two sorts of deceit are found in our verses: some leaders deceive the people of God (7:15–20), while some deceive themselves (7:21–23).

The human mind is a delusion generator, not a window to truth.

God designs people's emotions so you fall in love with people who, in return, wouldn't even use your hollowed-out skull for a spittoon.

Always remember that as long as other people are gullible, there's no limit to what you can achieve.

The human mind is a delusion generator, not a window to trurh.

Always remember that as long as other people are gullible, there's no limit to what you can achieve.

To the degree that the British right hand didn't know what the left was doing, it was because a select group of men at the highest reaches of its government went to great lengths to ensure it. To that end, they created a labyrinth of information firewalls—deceptions, in a less charitable assessment—to make sure that crucial knowledge was withheld from Britain's wartime allies and even from many of her own seniormost diplomats and military commanders.

In recounting the saga of Sasha Orlov, Peter Sichel gave a weary sigh. "It was a classic example of case officers falling in love with their agents. I tried to tell them they were being played. Unfortunately, in this case they refused to listen." But of course, everything in the intelligence shadow world can be interpreted from at least two different angles, because everything has the potential of being the precise opposite of what it first appears.

Roughly, religion is a community's costly and hard-to-fake commitment to a counterfactual and counterintuitive world of supernatural agents who master people's existential anxieties, such as death and deception. […] The more one accepts what is materially false to be really true, and the more one spends material resources in displays of such acceptance, the more others consider one's faith deep and one's commitment sincere.

Stacy waited till she was certain he'd fallen asleep, then slipped free of his grasp, edging backward, leaving his hand lying open on the tent's floor, palm up, slightly cupped, like a beggar's. She imagined dropping a coin into it, late at night on some dark city street; she pictured herself hurrying off, never to see him again.

Scott B. Smith

The trap is that even if you find a good metric that avoids the trap IBM fell into, people will naturally, even subconsciously, work to game the metric.

A smile cures all forms of sickness, yet behind many smiles lies a set of very sharp teeth, carnivorous and rarely satisfied.

i thought to myself well if there's a sucker out there it may as well be me for believing this jerk would stay in business if he paid all his writers like he was going to pay me. i mean he must not have even realized that poetry doesn't sell!

reality is often little more than a mirror reflecting visions made of ice and steel cold permanent and carefully contrived

Duke was not what you would call a natural actor, but he learned. And when he learned, he mastered one of the hardest things of all - to act natural. And he does it so well that a lot of people still don't know he's acting. - Paul Fix