Quotes About Deception

Believing passionately in the palpably not true... is the chief occupation of mankind.

Jury - A group of 12 people, who, having lied to the judge about their health, hearing, and business engagements, have failed to fool him.

It takes advantage of every passing craze and delusion of the mob to dispose of those who oppose it, and it maintains a complex and highly effective machine for launching such crazes and delusions when the supply of them lags.

They are brothers to the fox who boasted that he had made the hounds run....

Suffice it to say that the vile arts of the hussy prevailed over that noble and upright man—that she enticed him, by adroit appeals to his sympathy, into taking her upon automobile rides, into dining with her clandestinely in the private rooms of dubious hotels

But are not the dreams of poets and the tales of travellers notoriously false?

Her laughter was like sweet deadly venom.

several of our company told of ghosts, one, how a man had been slain on the way to the wars, but had not known it, his ghost going on, thinking himself alive, performing deeds of great valor, even returning home in triumph where he bought lands, begot sons, and lived in contentment for many years before discovering one day, by chance, that he was already dead.

Efficiunt Daemones, ut quae non sunt, sic tamen quasi sint, conspicienda hominibus exhibeant." —Lactantius

Devils so work that things which are not appear to men as if they were real.

Vorsicht ist die erste Sorge jener, die gelegentliche Scharlatanerie und Betrug gewöhnt sind.

Can't you hear how everyone tells lies; if not deliberately, then involuntarily; if not out loud, then silently?

Just remember what Satan says: I teach men what I learn from women!

Forgetting, along with hypocrisy, were, to him, the necessary arts central to living.

After seeing it work for so long, I began to perceive Charlie's charm as a method of robbing houses by persuading the owners to invite you in and take their possessions. I was in no doubt: it was robbery; there were objects of yours he wanted. And he took them. It was false and manipulative and I admired it tremendously.

Nothing ever really changes. Kids still get beaten up by their own parents and allow themselves to be tricked into believing lies." "And then along comes someone like you, who opens his heart to all those people who've been caught by the lie.

Only crime and the criminal, it is true, confront us with the perplexity of radical evil; but only the hypocrite is really rotten to the core.

The point is that both Hitler and Stalin held out promises of stability in order to hide their intention of creating a state of permanent instability.

Mass propaganda discovered that its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow.

The outstanding negative quality of the totalitarian elite is that it never stops to think about the world as it really is and never compares the lies with reality.

The result of a consistent and total substitution of lies for factual truth is not that the lie will now be accepted as truth and truth be defamed as a lie, but that the sense by which we take our bearings in the real world—and the category of truth versus falsehood is among the mental means to this end—is being destroyed.

Banality is the adopted disguise of a very powerful will to abolish conscience.

all facts that did not agree, or were likely to disagree, with the official fiction—data on crop-yields, criminality, true incidences of "counter-revolutionary" activities as distinguished from the later conspiracy fictions—were treated as non-facts.

Wanneer het totalitarisme aan de macht is, gebruikt het de staat als uiterlijke façade om het land in de niet-totalitaire wereld te representeren.[...]Ze moet de schijn van normaliteit en gezond verstand ophouden tegenover de normale buitenwereld.