Quotes About Deception

I can tell if I'm being lied to or manipulated a little better than most. It's definitely an advantage for me.

People aren't suckers. Some are, perhaps. But most people inside know when we're being lied to.

I don't like being lied to.

The thing about astroturfing is that it can be really believable.

In reality, the [American legal] system promotes chicanery, outright deceit, and other egregious conduct by trial lawyers.

There is an overwhelming inclination to keep the unsavory particulars hidden from public view, to pretend the calamity never occurred. Thus it has always been, and probably always will be. As Aeschylus, the illustrious Greek tragedian, noted in the fifth century B.C., "In war, truth is the first casualty.

When this casuistry came to light

Historian D. Michael Quinn refers to the Saints' bald-faced dissembling as "theocratic ethics." The Mormons called it "Lying for the Lord."*

Several were still pubescent girls, such as fourteen-year-old Helen Mar Kimball. Although she acquiesced when the prophet explained that God had commanded her to become his plural wife—and that she would be permitted twenty-four hours to comply—Helen later confided to a friend, "I was young, and they deceived me, by saying the salvation of our whole family depended on it.

paranoids have enemies, and conspiracies are only laughable when they fail to materialize.

It is slightly chilling to realize there are rational, functional people up there employed to spot, nurture, and exploit those down here among us who are irrational and can barely cope. If you want to know how stupid you're perceived to be by the people up there, count the unsolicited junk mail you receive. If you get a lot, you're perceived to be alluringly stupid.

We don't want obvious exploitation. We want smoke-and-mirrors exploitation.

So you faked it to give Zimbardo a better study?" I asked. "It was completely deliberate on my part," he replied. "I planned it. I mapped it out. I carried it through. It was all done for a purpose. I thought I was doing something good at the time.

Bad liars always think they're good at it. (quoting Michael Moynihan)

Facebook is where you lie to your friends, Twitter is where you tell the truth to strangers.

Tony faking his brain going wrong was a sign that his brain had gone wrong.

As a group they tend to be more charming than most people, she said. They have no warm emotions of their own but will study the rest of us. They're the boss or the coworker who likes to make other people jump just for the pleasure of seeing them jump. They're the spouse who marries to look socially normal but inside the marriage shows no love after the initial charm wears off.

like sticking a red nose on a cadaver and calling it Ronald McDonald.

He said I really had to be careful. Psychopaths are truly dangerous, he said. And they're often the people you least expect them to be. "When

Tony faked mental illness. That's when you have hallucinations and delusions. Mental illness comes and goes. It can get better with medication. Tony is a psychopath. That doesn't come and go. It is how the person is." Faking

frightening person pretending to be normal. Things

this was a man palpably simulating crying, which made the moment at once awkward, surreal, and quite disturbing.     Our

Time doesn't fly, it steals. Like some skilled pickpocket or magician, it gets you to look the other way and when you do, it ruthlessly steals your essential things—memories, great moments that end much too soon, the lives of those you love. It knows how to trick you and then steal you blind.

Politics can make people do terrible things