Quotes About Illusion

All David Blaine is is a good-looking magician.

Disbelief in magic can force a poor soul into believing in government and business.

How the American right managed to convince itself that the programs to alleviate poverty are responsible for the consequences of poverty will someday be studied as a notorious mass illusion.

People live with the illusion that we have a democratic system, but it's only the outward form of one. In reality we live in a plutocracy, a government of the rich.

...We're a government that believes in everybody having the illusion of free will.

Government [is] an illusion the governed should not encourage.

The U.S. is a cosmetic democracy.

Among the several cloudy appellatives which have been commonly employed as cloaks for misgovernment, there is none more conspicuous in this atmosphere of illusion than the word Order.

How pale is the art of sorcerers, witches, and conjurors when compared with that of the government's Treasury Department!

Governments resort to inflation with popular support because the people apparently are naïve enough to believe that they can have their cake and eat it, too.

I am big. It's the pictures that got small.

If Brideshead Revisited is not a great book, it's so like a great book that many of us, at least while reading it, find it hard to tell the difference.

I'm always amazed when I hear people saying, "That George Bush, he's a great leader". And I wonder, where can one find a drug that would make one so delusional?

The great day of the Fire-eater - or, should I say, the day of the great Fire-eater - has passed.

My photographs don't go below the surface. They don't go below anything. They're readings of the surface. I have great faith in surfaces. A good one is full of clues.

Like most misery, it started with apparent happiness.

True happiness consists in eliminating the false idea of 'I'.

Do not feel envious of the happiness of those who live in a fool's paradise, for only a fool will think that is happiness.

Happiness is a carnival game. It's never as easy as it looks, but the dumb ones always seem to be walking around with a big stuffed animal.

There is no greater misery than false joys.

What, exactly, is the happiness that can be earned by turning away from reality?

Happiness is the most insidious prison of all.

The world consists of imaginary people, claiming imaginary virtues and suffering from imaginary happiness.

If happiness always depends on something expected in the future, we are chasing a will-o'-the-wisp that ever eludes our grasp, until the future, and ourselves, vanish into the abyss of death.