Quotes About Deception

Zola wrote that the mendacity of the press could be divided into two groups: the yellow press lies every day without hesitating. But others, like the Times, speak the truth on all inconsequential occasions, so they can deceive the public with the requisite authority when it becomes necessary.

If anybody else had ever wanted me happy, they could have fooled me. Possibly Mom, as long as it didn't cross tracks with her own maneuvers. That's all people really want, for you to fit into their maneuvers.

Elizabeth was counting on Marco to keep cousin Mary occupied until after the board meeting was over. A piece of cheese might catch a mouse, but an afternoon alone with a muscular masseur would ensnare her cousin far more effectively. And afterwards, while Mary lay sated and sleeping upon a massage table, wiser heads could determine the company's future. There were times, Elizabeth thought, when success in business demanded utter ruthlessness.

Why him?He was as likely to offer me security and safety as a violent terrorist holding a gun to my head.So why I had chosen him?Because he had charmed me into a love affair,had truly convinced me he was madly in love with me.

Sometimes I think the urge to believe in our own worldview is our most powerful intellectual imperative, the mind's equivalent of feeding, fighting, and fornicating. People will eagerly twist facts into wholly unrecognizable shapes to fit them into existing suppositions. They'll ignore the obvious, select the irrelevant, and spin it all into a tapestry of self-deception, solely to justify an idea, no matter how impoverished or self-destructive.

Sometimes I think the urge to believe in our own worldview is our most powerful intellectual imperative, the mind's equivalent of feeding, fighting, and fornicating. People will eagerly twist facts into wholly unrecognizable shapes to fit them into existing suppositions. They'll ignore the obvious, select the irrelevant, and spin it all into a tapestry of self-deception, solely to justify an idea, no matter how impoverished or self-destructive. And

Sometimes I think the urge to believe in our own worldview is our most powerful intellectual imperative, the mind's equivalent of feeding, fighting, and fornicating. People will eagerly twist facts into wholly unrecognizable shapes to fit them into existing suppositions. They'll ignore the obvious, select the irrelevant, and spin it all into a tapestry of self-deception, solely to justify an idea, no matter how impoverished

Between her hand over my heart and her hips at my crotch, she might as well have been administering a polygraph.

Barry Eisler

A mole could only avoid and evade the monitoring systems of which he was aware. Which made it crucial that almost no one be permitted to see the whole picture. Within

He imagined a frog in a pot, the water getting gradually warmer, the frog never noticing any of it. He imagined people telling themselves they would never be part of something corrupt, then telling themselves they would only be part of it to make it better, then telling themselves, hey, the thing wasn't corrupt in the first place, it was just the way of the world, they'd been naïve before and now they were savvy.

I read Reinhold Niebuhr's Moral Man and Immoral Society, where Niebuhr talked about how the baser self has to deceive the better self to get the better self's buy-in for behavior it would never otherwise agree to.

George Burns line? 'Sincerity—if you can fake that, you've got it made.

Barry Eisler

It was fascinating, how people could be so reluctant to recognize blackmail, how eager they could be to convince themselves it was something else, even something fundamentally mutually cooperative. And sometimes it seemed the more powerful the individual, the greater the capacity for self-deception. He

Barry Eisler

Now it was "our purpose," something she taught her women's self-defense students to recognize as "forced teaming," when a person suggests he has something in common with his intended victim to get her to drop her guard.

I briefly considered whether it could be a setup. If they were on to me, though, this was already a pretty perfect venue. They didn't have to convince me to go somewhere else.

Barry Eisler

Barry Eisler

She's a bargirl. You don't know where her loyalties lie. That one was unconvincing. No one had directed her against me—I was the one who had been pursuing her. She hadn't needed to warn me about the bugs. My gut told me she wasn't dissembling.

Sun Tsu: When strong, feign weakness. When weak, feign strength.

there are no bad guys, any more than there are good guys. There are only smart people, and stupid ones; puppets, and puppet masters

I wondered if she had bought the story. If she hadn't thanked Harry for his response, I would have known she hadn't bought it, because she was classy and it wouldn't have been like her not to respond. But the thank-you might have been automatic, sent even in the presence of continued suspicions. It could even have been duplicitous, intended to lull Harry into thinking she was satisfied when in fact the opposite was true.