Quotes About Deception

and called you cousin while reaching around to put the knife between your shoulder blades. This contest was supposed to be so high and mighty — a chance to shape the future. But the nitty-gritty was more like a reality TV show called Who Wants to Be a Backstabber? It was getting more cutthroat by the hour. Were all Cahills so

The very first Maxim of Tyranny, is and always was, to puzzle the Understandings and excite the Admiration of the People.

On the throne of the world, any delusion can become fact.

Once a country is habituated to liars, it takes generations to get the truth back.

Seward appreciated the honest and open way that Stanton lied; it was the hallmark of the truly great lawyer, and demonstrated a professional mastery not unlike his own.

presidents, when not outright telling lies, feel obliged to shade the truth most of the time. This is called politics; when a president lies successfully, he is called a statesman.

Since they did not understand one another, each was able to sustain an illusion about the other, which was the usual beginning of love, if not truth.

As we rounded a small pavilion, we nearly stepped into a pair of figures — who leapt apart. One was William de la Touche Clancey. The other was a well-made boy of perhaps sixteen, carefully got up to resemble a swell; only the red blunt hands betrayed the fact that he was a workie. So! Clancey gave his accusing goose-like hiss. The boy looked embarrassed, as well he should. There are some things that the poor ought not to do even for money.

And remember, comrades, your resolution must never falter. No argument must lead you astray. Never listen when they tell you that Man and the animals have a common interest, that the prosperity of the one is the prosperity of the others. It is all lies

Comment, Mademoiselle? Vous appellés cela betrügen? Corriger la fortune, l'enchainer sous ses doits, etre sûr de son fait, das nenn die Deutsch betrügen? betrügen! O, was ist die deutsch Sprak für ein arm Sprak! für ein plump Sprak!

I want men to admire me, but that's a trick you learn at school--a movement of the eyes, a tone of voice, a touch of the hand on the shoulder or the head. If they think you admire them, they will admire you because of your good taste, and when they admire you, you have an illusion for a moment that there's something to admire.

When I replied that I loved her too in that way, I was the liar, not she, for I never lose the consciousness of time: to me the present is never here: it is always last year or next week.

Lies had deserted me, and I felt as lonely as though they had been my only friends.

The problem of pretending to be alive.

Be Disloyal. It's your duty to the human race. The human race needs to survive and it's the loyal man who dies first from anxiety or a bullet or overwork. If you have to earn a living...and the price they make you pay is loyalty, be a double agent--and never let either of the two sides know your real name.

His question reminded me of how easy he had been to deceive, so easy that he seemed to me almost a conniver at his wife's unfaithfulness, as the man who leaves loose banknotes in a hotel bedroom connives at theft, and I hated him for the very quality which had once helped my love.

If they think you admire them, they will admire you because of your good taste, and when they admire you, you have an illusion for a moment that there's something to admire.

I like to have a secret love affair, a hidden life, something to lie about.

What they had both thought was safety proved to have been the camouflage of an enemy who works in terms of friendship, trust and pity.

The Lord is my shepherd. But if we are sheep why in heaven's name should we trust our shepherd? He's going to guard us from the wolves all right, oh yes, but only so that he can sell us later to the butcher.

There's no such thing as gratitude in politics.

If they think you admire them, they will admire you because of your good taste, and when they admire you, you have an illusion for a moment that there's something to admire. All my life I've tried to live that illusion.

one gets so hopelessly tired of deception.

They killed him because he was too innocent to live. He was young and ignorant and silly and he got involved. He had no more of a notion than any of you what the whole affair's about, and you gave him money and York Harding's books on the East and said, 'Go ahead. Win the East for democracy.' He never saw anything he hadn't heard in a lecture hall, and his writers and his lecturers made a fool of him.