Quotes About Deception

Virtue often is used to camouflage cowardice.

between the conscious lie to fool others and unconscious self-justification to fool ourselves, there's a fascinating gray area patrolled by an unreliable, self-serving historian—memory. Memories are often pruned and shaped with an ego-enhancing bias that blurs the edges of past events, softens culpability, and distorts what really happened.

Centuries of experience show that people will tell their tormenters what they want to hear, whether it's confessing to witchcraft in Salem, admitting to counterrevolutionary tendencies in Soviet Russia or concocting stories about Iraq and Al Qaeda."20 Indeed, the Senate Intelligence report confirmed that no information gained from torturing detainees had proved useful in capturing or killing any terrorist, including Osama bin Laden.

Flattery is the province of fools—those who give it and those who believe it.

Blue skies can be misleading.

Nothing is ever as it seems. We hide our reality from the outside world and from each other. We float along on process, Anthony and I—What will we have for dinner, did you call your mother, what time do you think you'll be home? Phone calls and kisses and thank-you notes. You can lose a whole life on that.

The only thing crueler than a cage so small that a bird can't fly is a cage so large that a bird thinks it can fly.

And there is nothing more terrifying than realizing the one who knows you best loves you least.

Your skin is a waste of space because there's no heart inside of you

There is nothing more terrifying than realizing that the one who knows you best loves you least, pities you even.

She wasted my heart, my time.

Los Angeles is full of places to hide a body, but when the person inside the body doesn't love you, it's not an easy thing, turning that breathing person into a dead one.

well, you can't call yourself a hero if you're lying to someone you love.

And [Benji] cheats on you, Beck. A lot. Compulsively. He is in intense pursuit of a performance artist who fucks with his head the way he fucks with yours.

You see Elliot in Hannah scam his way to be near his sister-in-law and you call that romantic but if you knew what I went through to get into your home, that I messed up my back trying to know you, inside and out, you'd judge me for it.

one minute you are the victim of my evildoing (LOL)

From every boy masquerading as a man that you let into your body, your heart. You learned you didn't have whatever magic turns a beast into a prince.

feel like a sucker and I want to tear my own head off because I can't believe that I fell for his bullshit. I can't believe I told him things I never tell anyone.

The most romantic time of my life was a hoax

Are you fucking kidding me, you lying thieving hairy-legged beast?

The only thing crueler than a cage so small that a bird can't fly is a cage so large that a bird thinks it can fly. Only a monster would lock a bird in here and call himself an animal lover.

Once you take to the habit of deception, every new lie comes that much easier. Though to me it wasn't so much lies as a matter of judicious editing. We all inevitably present a version of ourselves that is a collection of half-truths and exclusions. The way I saw it, the truth was too complicated, whereas the well-chosen lie would put everyone's mind at ease.

Memory is faithless, like a cheating lover, telling you what you believe is true.

For a long time, when it's working, the drink feels like a path to a kind of self-enlightenment, something that turns us into the person we wish to be, or the person we think we are. In some ways the dynamic is simple: alcohol makes everything better, until it makes everything worse.