Quotes About Deception

Hell is empty And all the devils are here. —William Shakespeare, The Tempest

I played baccarat at the upscale Bellagio; roulette at the off-strip Rio; craps at the fading Riviera, whose attempts to match the gayness and glitter around her felt forced, artificial, like makeup layered on by a woman who recognizes she was never beautiful to begin with and has now, in addition, grown colorless and old.

Memory, the whole lying opera of it.

Nothing on the face of this earth - and I do mean nothing - is half so dangerous as a children's story that happens to be real, and you and I are wandering blindfolded through a myth devised by a maniac.

Within an hour we had a visit from a gentleman with shifty eyes and an interesting pattern of knife scars where his nose used to be

Fraud, my children! Fraud and forgery. Dry rot covered with paint and gilded with lies

What looks attractive in prospect doesn't always look so good in practice.

Useful thing a warrant. Murder and theft change their names if you have one.

The player is always trapped in his own play but he must never allow the spectators to suspect this, they must always think that he is free. Thus the great art of the player is not in showing but in concealing.

he truly suffered . . . not as some unbelievers say, that he suffered only in appearance. They are the ones who are only an appearance

We knew about Gnostic forgeries for a long time before we actually had any of them.

if the ends are sufficiently important to require lies instead of the truth.

because it intends to lead readers astray. But in another sense plagiarism can be seen as the flip side of forgery. Forgers write their own words and claim they are the words of another; plagiarists take the words of another and claim they are their own.

but by a forger

Often their false teachings are said to be matched by their promiscuous lives.

The picture that bowls you over at first sight and the next day loses even the power to attract your attention is one that looks always the same. It has a moment of life but dies immediately thereafter.

Fiction is the truth inside the lie

He could not even kid himself that everything had not been up front, because it had been. And he hadn't even done it alone. There were currently ninety-five other fools in this parade.

What we like to think of ourselves and what we really are rarely have much in common

Sooner or later, if there isn't a turncoat, the people make one.

When traitors are called heroes (or heroes traitors, he supposed in his frowning way), dark times must have fallen.

Oh, about beer I never lie,' Crandall said. 'A man who lies about beer makes enemies.

In scenes like these, any man could be Iago.

Most politicians lie for the same reason a monkey swings by his tail, which is to say because he can.