Quotes About Deception

Falsehoods cease being false when enough people believe them, Bakal. Instead, they blaze like eternal truths, and woe to the fool who tries pissing a stream on that. They'll tear you to pieces.

Tene Baralta's mailed hand was a blur as it flashed out and struck Mebra, the spurred links raking deep gashes across the man's face. Blood spattered the wall. The spy reeled back, hands to his torn face.

when there is a difference between perception and reality, perception always wins. Behind

There is no way to tell which version of a lie is the truth.

Bad books always lie. They lie most of all about the human condition.

divert the discussion from its main intent and fasten upon some statement of mine which lacks a hair's-breadth of the truth and, under this hair, hide the fault of another which is as big as a ship's cable.

She had a disapproving look that was just a little exaggerated; if you look carefully at that look, you can spot a smile that hangs around its edges and usually draw it out.

A lie once told remains a lie, but a lie told a thousand times becomes the truth," the infamous Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels memorably claimed.

Members are indoctrinated to believe that the Training Routines will help them be more effective in their lives—earn more money, be better communicators, get better jobs. Later they are told that by performing these routines they will help clear the planet of poverty, crime, disease—indeed, of all of humanity's problems. At the highest level, members are told that they can control matter, energy, space, and time. The truth is, they are the ones being controlled.

By this Orwellian logic, happiness is suffering and suffering is happiness.

the method is still the same: appeal to weakness, bolster myth, and massage fantasy.

False teaching always does.

Betrayal is a facet of love.

our minds can do strange things, can convince us of things that aren't real. Sometimes we see things that aren't really there, sometimes we don't see things that are. We're all experts at fictionalizing the truth.

It would be like trying to make love to your wife, knowing she was simultaneously making love to six other people!

You talk about deus ex machina, well, we're talking about deus in machina. You start by thinking there's a god in the box. And then you find there isn't anything in the box. You put the god in the box.

All words are masks and the lovelier they are, the more they are meant to conceal.

I had thought that words were instruments of precision. Now I know that they devour the world, leaving nothing in its place.

Do you believe that the actor on the stage is really a villain? Let me ask you something else. If he isn't a villain, then is he a liar?

The more the mouse pursues this line of of thought, the more it seems to him that the cat is a large, soft mouse.

Or at least that's what the emperor wants us to think. It's an old Roman ploy, pretending that an enemy is responsible for the start of a war we greatly desire to wage.

That's the problem with Domitian, isn't it?" said Lucius. "We never know what's real and what's not. All the city is a stage. Everything that happens is a spectacle put on by the emperor. One wonders if he himself knows any longer what's real.

The problem was me. I was...I was a pathological liar. Or am, I should say. Lying is like alcoholism, one is always "recovering".

One day when I was little, and my parents were having a party, I went around to all the adults and said, "Drink this, it'll make you taller, it's magic." And they all drank it and said, "How cute. How weird." And then I snuck off into the room where they kept all the coats and hemmed everyone's sleeves an inch shorter.