245 Quotes on Manipulation and Deceit – Inspire Quotes Sayings
Quotes on Manipulation and Deceit
“Everybody has the ability to be manipulative, to be hateful and deceitful.” —Neil LaBute
“When it comes to controlling human beings there is no better instrument than lies. Because, you see, humans live by beliefs. And beliefs can be manipulated.” —Michael Ende
“When it comes to controlling human beings, there is no better instrument than lies. Because you see, humans live by beliefs. And beliefs can be manipulated. The power to manipulate beliefs is the only thing that counts.” —Michael Ende
“The theist can only find meaning by leaving this life for a transcendental world beyond the grave. The human world as he finds it is empty of ‘ultimate purpose’ and hence meaningless. Theism thus is an attempt to escape from the human condition; it is a pathetic deceit.” —Paul Kurtz
Best Quotes about Deceit
“I am not what I am.” —Shakespeare
“Mercerism is a swindle!” —Philip K. Dick
“You’d con your own father, Frank.” —Frank
“One face, one voice, one habit, and two persons!” —Shakespeare
“The really bad monsters never look like monsters.” —Leigh Bardugo
“The bigger the lie, the more they believe it.” —Gillian Flynn
“A boy simply wasn’t worth a man’s wages. So I aged ten years overnight.” —Frank
“Be careful who you trust, for even the Devil was once an Angel.” —Bianca Scardoni
“Spiritual devastation is more likely to come from an enemy with a smiling face.” —Neil Postman
“I wasn’t a Pan Am pilot or any other kind of pilot. I was an imposter…” —Frank
“Commercials … provide a slogan … that creates for viewers a comprehensive and compelling image of themselves.” —Neil Postman
“Connor looks flustered and cornered for a moment before he comes to his senses and says, ‘Yeah. Yeah, I am.’” —Neal Schusterman
The devil will try any trick to keep God’s people out of spiritual warfare… he has everything to gain by it. —Frank Hammond
″‘you two can do whatever you like. Rise and I broke up this morning. Should I turn off the light when I leave?’” —Neal Schusterman
″‘so… everything that happened back there was all a show?’ Now it’s Connor’s turn to be unsure. ‘I guess. Sort of. Wasn’t it?’ —Neal Schusterman
“The most dangerous enemy is not the one who lingers behind you in the shadows, but the one who walks beside you as a friend.” —Bianca Scardoni
“And then she understood the devilish cunning of the enemies’ plan. By mixing a little truth with it they had made their lie far stronger.” —C. S. Lewis
“Then I’ll make you a promise too, Tally Youngblood. Until you do help us, to the very best of your ability, you will never be pretty.” —Scott Westerfeld
“He asked you quite openly to flatter him, to admire him, his little dodges deceived nobody. What she disliked was his narrowness, his blindness, she said, looking after him.” —Virginia Woolf
“I was an imposter, one of the most wanted criminals on four continents, and at the moment I was doing my thing, putting a super hype on some nice people.” —Frank
“I’ve been described by ities and news reporters as one of this century’s cleverest bum-check passers, flimflam artists and crooks, a con man of Academy Award caliber. I was a swindler and and poseur of astonishing ability.” —Frank
“It’s a scientific fact that the bumblebee can’t fly, either. But he does, and he makes a lot of honey on the side. And that’s all I intended to be. A bumblebee in Pan Am’s honey hive.” —Frank
“I was always aware that I was Frank Abagnale, Jr., that I was a check swindler and a faker, and if and when I was caught I wasn’t going to win any Oscars. I was going to jail.” —Frank
“You see this creature with her kerbstone English: the English that will keep her in the gutter to the end of her days. Well, sir, in three months I could pass that girl off as a duchess at an ambassador’s garden party.” —George Bernard Shaw
“But it’s a trick, Tally. You’ve only seen pretty faces your whole life. Your parents, your teachers, everyone over sixteen. But you weren’t born expecting that kind of beauty in everyone, all the time. You just got programmed into thinking anything else is ugly.” —Scott Westerfeld
“I am convinced that human life is filled with many pure, happy, serene examples of insincerity, truly splendid of their kind-of people deceiving one another without (strangely enough) any wounds being inflicted, of people who seem unaware even that they are deceiving one another.” —Osamu Dazai
“I was quite frightened once or twice because Eliza was doing it so well. You see, lots of the real people can’t do it at all: they’re such fools that they think style comes by nature to people in their position; and so they never learn.” —George Bernard Shaw
“The lieutenant gave me the name. He said, “You don’t look dangerous, but you are, and you blend with nature like a green snake, deceptive and deadly when you want to be.” I was happy with my name, and on every raid I made sure I did as my name required.” —Ishmael Beah
“I’m not bragging when I say that I’m one of the best liars in the world but I got to tell you, Todd was pretty doggone good. It seemed like he knew some of the things I know, the things I think of all the time and try to remember so I don’t make the same mistake more than seven or eight times.” —Christopher Paul Curtis
Quotes about Lies and Deceit
“Fears and lies intensify consciousness.” —Mason Cooley
“Lukashenko grabbed victory through force and lies.” —Alaksandar Milinkievic
“In moderating, not satisfying desires, lies peace.” —Ben Hecht
“Truth hurts. But lies can kill.” —Karen Marie Moning
“His lies were so exquisite I almost wept.” —Dave Eggers
“Anything is better than lies and deceit! —Leo Tolstoy
“Low on his funeral couch he lies! —Thomas Gray
“Act well your part, there all the honour lies.” —Alexander Pope
“Ask no questions, and you’ll be told no lies.” —Charles Dickens
“Half the lies our opponents tell about us are untrue.” —Boyle Roche
“Mere flimflam stories, and nothing but shams and lies.” —Miguel de Cervantes
“Since there my past life lies, why alter it? —Robert Browning
“That’s where the future lies, in the youth of today.” —Willie Stargell
“All of what the government said is lies upon lies.” —Ahmed Abu Khattala
“Lies like that are not a sin, they are a sacrifice.” —Ann-Marie MacDonald
“I was on a train of lies. I couldn’t jump off.” —Clifford Irving
“Tell all the Truth, but tell it slant/Success in Circuit lies…” —Emily Dickinson
“All these things they’ve been saying are a pack of lies.” —Tina Louise
“No. Harsh truth was better than comfortable lies. It had to be.” —Kelley Armstrong
“These are lies, there is not a word of truth in them.” —Richard Perle
“A lie which is a half-truth is ever the blackest of lies.” —Alfred Lord Tennyson
“Things come apart so easily when they have been held together with lies.” —Dorothy Allison
“Power is a trick. It lies where we believe it lies.” —George R. R. Martin
“Time will inevitably uncover dishonesty and lies; history has no place for them.” —Norodom Sihanouk
“A truth that’s told with bad intent beats all the lies you can invent.” —William Blake
“With lies you may go ahead in the world, but you can never go back.” —Proverb
“A lie which is half a truth is ever the blackest of lies.” —Alfred Lord Tennyson
“It’s time to bury the war hatchet and to forget where it lies —Viktor Yushchenko
“It makes more sense to find out where the middle- and long-term common ground lies.” —Gerhard Schroder
“You can’t build the bridge of trust with the scaffolding of lies and underhand deals.” —Ian Paisley
“The English are polite by telling lies. The Americans are polite by telling the truth.” —Malcolm Bradbury
“It’s obvious that things aren’t going well over there. This is a war based on lies.” —Cindy Sheehan
“It was amazing how it worked: the tiniest bit of truth made credible the greatest lies.” —Jeffrey Eugenides
“No deceit is so veiled as that which lies concealed behind the semblance of courtesy.” —Marcus Tullius Cicero
“One of my movies was called ‘True Lies.’ It’s what the Democrats should have called their convention.” —Arnold Schwarzenegger
“I can’t stand by and allow tens of thousands of innocent people to be slaughtered for lies.” —Dave Collins
“The very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world. Lies will pass into history.” —George Orwell
“Energy never lies. If you work at your right rhythm, you will be more productive trust me.” —Judith Orloff
“Practically all the relationships I know are based on a foundation of lies and mutually accepted delusion.” —Kim Cattrall
“One of the lies that we tell ourselves is that we’re making progress; but Huey’s chair’s empty.” —H. Rap Brown
“I know there is much mystery, much question to what happened, and I must also say, many lies.” —Jennifer Capriati
“What bothers me is that Jim Bakker lies. Jim Bakker knows for a fact that I was virgin.” —Jessica Hahn
“An autobiography can distort; facts can be realigned. But fiction never lies: it reveals the writer totally.” —V. S. Naipaul
“A liar is a liar and lives on the lies he tells and dies in a life of lies.” —Carl Sandburg
“It’s often only in the lies we refuse to speak that any truth can be heard at all.” —Karen Marie Moning
“In the end, Leck should have stuck to his lies. For it was the truth he almost told that killed him.” —Kristin Cashore
“We have to repair that trust … I think anytime a public official lies, he undermines his own it and squanders the public trust.” —Bill Bradley
“You may tell the greatest lies and wear a brilliant disguise, but you can’t escape the eyes of the one who sees right through you.” —Tom Robbins
“They really don’t know where the future lies. If developers decide to build a high-rise where the McCormick building is, they’d have nowhere to go.” —Jose Gonzalez
“Gradually I came to realize that people will more readily swallow lies than truth, as if the taste of lies was homey, appetizing: a habit.” —Martha Gellhorn
“Lies are neither bad nor good. Like a fire they can either keep you warm or burn you to death, depending on how they’re used.” —Max Brooks
“Some of the most successful relationships are based on lies and deceit. Since that’s where they usually end up anyway, it’s a logical place to start.” —Yuri Orlov
“There are only two things. Truth and lies. Truth is indivisible, hence it cannot recognize itself; anyone who wants to recognize it has to be a lie.” —Franz Kafka
“Remember that it is not enough to abstain from lying by word of mouth; for the worst lies are often conveyed by a false look, smile, or act.” —Abraham Cahan
“The reason why Schubert is celebrated so much today, lies rather in the fact that there has been nobody else like him – not before him, not after him.” —Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau
“I just refuse to listen to any more lies. You hear them from FEMA, you hear them from Red Cross and I just didn’t want to hear it from him.” —Avery Johnson
“As an audience member, I like watching Rupert as an actor when he’s most playful… I think Rupert is really adept at comedy I think that’s where his strength lies.” —Benjamin Bratt
“Could all be lies. Could all be part of revenge scheme, planned during his decade behind bars. But if true, then what? […] Never mind. Answers soon. Nothing is insoluble.” —Alan Moore
“In the last few days, I have been the victim of a campaign of slander and shameful lies, a campaign which has deeply shocked and hurt me. Enough is enough.” —Dominique de Villepin
“We understand that as public figures, we are a target for people who have nothing to lose in their quest for fame and easy money, … preposterous, slanderous and defamatory lies.” —Emilio Estefan
“It was what you did, Wolgast understood; you started to tell a story about who you were, and soon enough the lies were all you had and you became that person.” —Justin Cronin
“For us to maintain our way of living, we must tell lies to each other and especially to ourselves. The lies are necessary because, without them, many deplorable acts would become impossibilities.” —Derrick Jensen
“Barbara said she knew it was in as soon as she shot it. She’s told me a lot of lies over the last four years, but that was the biggest one I’ve ever heard.” —Geno Auriemma
“Out of abysses of Illiteracy, through labyrinths of Lies, across wastelands of Disease . . . We advance Out of dead-ends of Poverty, through wilderness of Superstition, across barricades of Jim Crowism . . . We advance.” —Melvin B. Tolson
“Only fools argue whether to eat meat or not. They don’t understand truth nor do they meditate on it. Who can define what is meat and what is plant who knows where the sin lies, being a vegetarian or a non-vegetarian.” —Guru Nanak
“Not to discontinue our allegiance, in this case, would be to join with the sovereign in promoting the slavery and misery of that society, the welfare of which, we ourselves, as well as our sovereign, are indispensably obliged to secure and promote, as far as in us lies.” —Jonathan Mayhew
“I’m OK. Much better than on other occasions. It’s true that I’ve made lots of mistakes but I’ve never tried to bother anyone. I want to stay alive, preferably in peace, without seeing every one of my mistakes in the papers, and on many occasions, even stories that are lies.” —George Best
“The EU report speaks for itself. The statement in my view shows that the mission has turned out to be something worse than a farce, we shall in the coming days and weeks see what we can do to expose the pack of lies and innuendoes that ise the garbage in this report.” —Meles Zenawi
Self-Deceit Quotes and Sayings
“Nothing is easier than self-deceit.” —Demosthenes
“Nothing is easier than to deceive one’s self, as our affections are subtle persuaders.” —Demosthenes
“Promoting self under the guise of promoting Christ is currently so common as to excite little notice.” —A.W. Tozer
“There is nothing in the world more shameful than establishing one’s self on lies and fables.” —Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
“Something else drove (Connor) to run to that porch, but whatever the real reason was, Connor’s keeping it to himself.” —Neal Schusterman
“Woman is adept at getting money for herself and will not easily let herself be deceived; she understands deceit too well herself.” —Aristophanes
“It is as easy to deceive one’s self without perceiving it, as it is difficult to deceive others without their finding out.” —Francois de La Rochefoucauld
“There is nothing more natural than to consider everything as starting from oneself, chosen as the center of the world; one finds oneself thus capable of condemning the world without even wanting to hear its deceitful chatter.” —Guy Debord
“I was fighting it left all day, just enough to get myself in difficult positions to get up and down. The par 5s have been good to be all week, and the three places I missed, I didn’t get good lies.” —Darren Clarke
“The pictures from the first professional photo session that the young David Beckham submitted himself to are extraordinary. He has a barely suppressed smile, as though he and the cameraman are complicit in the understanding that this is not yet David Beckham we see and that there is an element of deceit in selling the photographs as such.” —Julie Burchill
“In endeavor itself there is a certain dynamic entertainment, affording an illusion of useful purpose. With achievement the illusion is dispelled. Man’s greatest accomplishment is to produce change. The only good in life is study, because study is an endeavor that never reaches fulfillment. It busies a man to the end of his days, and it aims at the only true reality in all this world of shams and deceits.” —Rafael Sabatini
Quotes about Deceit in Love
“We are easily fooled by that which we love.” —Moliere
“I will drop in his way some obscure epistles of love…” —Shakespeare
“In love deceit nearly always goes further than mistrust.” —Francois de La Rochefoucauld
“I never lie,” I said offhand. “At least not to those I don’t love.” —Anne Rice
“I think of the irony that in our language [Nepali] the word for love can also mean deceit.” —Jane Wilson-Howarth
“The look of love alarms because ’tis filled with fire; But the look of soft deceit shall sin the lover’s hire.” —William Blake
“For a woman, all resurrection, all salvation, from whatever perdition, lies in love; in fact, it is her only way to it.” —Fyodor Dostoevsky
“Love binds, and it binds forever. Good binds while evil unravels. Separation is another word for evil; it is also another word for deceit.” —Michel Houellebecq
“There is a smile of love, and there is a smile of deceit, and there is a smile of smiles In which these two smiles meet.” —William Blake
“I feel like something is dying, ruined beyond repair. If the Officials orchestrated our whole love affair, the one thing I thought happened in spite of them…” —Ally Condie
“When one is in love, one always begins by deceiving one’s self, and one always ends by deceiving others. That is what the world calls a romance.” —Oscar Wilde
William Shakespeare Quotes on Lies and Deceit
“Which means she to deceive, father or mother? —William Shakespeare
“Whose tongue soe’er speaks false, not truly speaks; who speaks not truly, lies.” —William Shakespeare
“For having traffic with thyself alone, Thou of thyself thy sweet self dost deceive.” —William Shakespeare
“Ah, that deceit should steal such gentle shape, and with a virtuous vizor hide deep vice! —William Shakespeare
“Was ever containing such vile matter so fairly bound O, that deceit should dwelling such a gorgeous palace.” —William Shakespeare
“Teach me, dear creature, how to think and speak Lay open to my earthy-gross conceit, Smother’d in errors, feeble, shallow, weak, The folded meaning of your words’ deceit.” —William Shakespeare
“Grief fills the room up of my absent child, lies in his bed, walks up and down with me, puts on his pretty looks, and repeats his words.” —William Shakespeare
“Because I cannot flatter and look fair, Smile in men’s faces, smooth, deceive, and cog, Duck with French nods and apish courtesy, I must be held a rancorous enemy.” —William Shakespeare
“What need I fear of thee but yet I’ll make assurance double sure, and take a bond of fate thou shalt not live that I may tell pale-hearted fear it lies, and sleep in spite of thunder.” —William Shakespeare
“For as a surfeit of the sweetest things the deepest loathing to the stomach brings, Or as tie heresies that men do leave are hated most of those they did deceive, so thou, my surfeit and my heresy, Of all be hated, but the most of me.” —William Shakespeare
Quotes and Sayings About Deceit
“Appearances often are deceiving.” —Aesop
“Wiles and deceit are female qualities.” —Aeschylus
“They mislead the unwitting masses.” —Huang Huahua
“Never try to snow a snowman.” —Bo Belinsky
“There is no language without deceit.” —Italo Calvino
“Lying and stealing are next door neighbors.” —Arabic Proverb
“Our distrust of another justifies his deceit.” —La Rochefoucauld
“None are deceived but they that confide.” —Benjamin Franklin
“We have made the Reich by propaganda.” —Joseph Goebbels
“Yet still we hug the dear deceit.” —Nathaniel Cotton
“Who makes the fairest show means most deceit.” —Pericles
“A liar is always lavish of oaths.” —Pierre Corneille
“The best of women are hypocrites.” —William Makepeace Thackeray
“Trust not in him that seems a saint.” —Thomas Fuller
“Like all valuable commodities, truth is often counterfeited.” —James Cardinal Gibbons
“God is not averse to deceit in a holy cause.” —Aeschylus
“Remembrance of death saves one from this world’s deceit.” —Bill Vaughan
“Our distrust justifies the deceit of others.” —Francois de La Rochefoucauld
“Deceit is in haste, but honesty can wait a fair leisure.” —Proverb
“The art of pleasing is the art of deception.” —Marquis De Vauvenargues
“It is twice the pleasure to deceive the deceiver.” —Jean De La Fontaine
“Truth is often the favorite tool of those who deceive.” —Bryant H. McGill
“Men, like musical instruments, seem made to be played upon.” —Christian Nestell Bovee
“It is not being deceived, but undeceived, that renders us miserable.” —Sophie Arnould
“Deceive the rich and powerful if you will, but don’t insult them.” —Japanese Proverb
“The cunning man uses deceit, but the more cunning man shuns deception.” —Adam Ferguson
“We never deceive for a good purpose; knavery adds malice to falsehood.” —La Bruyere
“During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act.” —George Orwell
“Fraud and deceit abound in these days more than in former times.” —Edward Coke
“In olden times an enemy was sometimes poisoned by a bouquet,—deceit sugar-coated.” —Hugh Latimer
“Invariably, micromanaging results in four problems: deceit, disloyalty, conflict, and communication problems.” —John Rosemond
“I’ve learned that sometimes a smile represents the greatest form of deceit.” —Michael Gilbert
“… there is no end to the deceits of the past …” —Vernon Lee
“O, what a tangled web we weave; when first we practice to deceive! —Sir Walter Scott
“A deception that elevates us is dearer than a host of low truths.” —Marina Tsvetaeva
“With affection beaming in one eye, and calculation shining out of the other.” —Charles Dickens
“The secret of life is to appreciate the pleasure of being terribly deceived.” —Oscar Wilde
“Propaganda is as powerful as heroin; it surreptitiously dissolves all capacity to think.” —Gil Courtemanche
“Fraud and deceit are anxious for your money. Be informed and prudent.” —John Andreas Widtsoe
“It is the act of a bad man to deceive by falsehood.” —Marcus Tullius Cicero
“He seemed for dignity composed and high exploit: But all was false and hollow.” —John Milton
“False words are not only evil in themselves, but they infect the soul with evil.” —Plato
“The woman in us still prosecutes a deceit like that begun in the garden.” —Joseph Glanvill
“The old fellow seemed to spot deceit as if it reeked like a goat.” —Margery Allingham
“Get your facts first, and then you can distort them as much as you please.” —Mark Twain
“It contains a misleading impression, not a lie. It was being economical with the truth.” —Robert Armstrong
“We pay a person the compliment of acknowledging his superiority whenever we lie to them.” —Samuel Butler
“Cunning is the art of concealing our own defects, and discovering the weaknesses of others.” —William Hazlitt
“It is a pity that we so often succeed our endeavors to deceive each other.” —Empress Irene
“We fed the public a line of deceit, dishonesty, a fabrication of statistics and figures.” —Bernard Nathanson
“Whatever others may say, they say it to deceive and comfort themselves, not help you.” —Dejan Stojanovic
“I have always had a lot more trouble with my truths than with my deceits.” —Mercedes McCambridge
“It is discouraging how many people are shocked by honesty and how few by deceit.” —Noel Coward
“Tricks and treachery are the practice of fools, that don’t have brains enough to be honest.” —Benjamin Franklin
“It’s discouraging to think how many people are shocked by honesty and how few by deceit.” —Noel Coward
“Bread of deceit is sweet to a man; but afterwards his mouth shall be filled with gravel.” —Bible
“Of darkness visible so much be lent, as half to show, half veil, the deep intent.” —Alexander Pope
“We deceive and flatter no one by such delicate artificies as we do our own selves.” —Arthur Schopenhauer
“The surest way of making a dupe is to let your victim suppose you are his.” —Bill Vaughan
“The world is full of corruption, and deceit, and deviltry — chock full of it.” —James Montgomery Bailey
“The art of using deceit and cunning grow continually weaker and less effective to the user.” —John Tillotson
“Deceit is in the heart of them that imagine evil: but to the counsellors of peace is joy.” —Bible
“Yeah, it never fails to amaze me how a single lie can undo an entire lifetime of good.” —Sherlyn Kenyon
“I’m not upset that you lied to me, I’m upset that from now on I can’t believe you.” —Friedrich Nietzsche
“For the Lord touched all parts of creation, and freed and undeceived them all from every deceit.” —Athanasius of Alexandria
“Tragedy is restful: and the reason is that hope, that foul, deceitful thing, has no part in it.” —Jean Anouilh
“The greatest threat to peace is the barrage of rightist propaganda portraying war as decent, honorable, and patriotic.” —Jeannette Rankin
“It is my belief that nearly any invented quotation, played with confidence, stands a good chance to deceive.” —Mark Twain
“It many times falls out that we deem ourselves much deceived in others because we first deceived ourselves.” —Philip Sidney
“Persistent distrust is the flame of deceit. Be as good as your word or be signed by the heat.” —Wes Fessler
“The silly when deceived exclaim loudly; the fool complains; the honest man walks away and is silent.” —Francois de la Noue
“People would not long remain in social life if they were not the dupes of each other.” —Francois de La Rochefoucauld
“If mankind were only just what they pretend to be, the problem of the millennium would be immediately solved.” —Josh Billings
“No man is happy without a delusion of some kind. Delusions are as necessary to our happiness as realities.” —Christian Nevell Bovee
“Hateful to me as the gates of Hades is that man who hides one thing in his heart and speaks another.” —Homer
“It is generally a feminine eye that first detects the moral deficiencies hidden under the ‘dear deceit’ of beauty.” —T. S. Eliot
“Skilled in every trick, a worthy heir of his paternal craft, he would make black look like white, and white look black.” —Ovid
“Sony has engaged in a technological version of cloak and dagger deceit against consumers by hiding secret files on their computers.” —Greg Abbott
“Nothing is more deceitful than the appearance of humility. It is often only carelessness of opinion, and sometimes an indirect boast.” —Jane Austen
“One deceit needs many others, and so the whole house is built in the air and must soon come to the ground.” —Baltasar Gracian
“There were weekends and evening hours. A lot of time went in to defend what proved to be a deceitful action.” —F. Thomson Leighton
“The truth is not in the commercial media because the truth is a dagger pointed at its heart, which is its pocket.” —George Seldes
“Almost all people are hypnotics. The proper ity saw to it that the proper belief should be induced, and the people believed properly.” —Charles Fort
“Russia, Russia-unwashed, backward, appealing Russia, so ashamed of your own backwardness, so orientally determined to conceal it from us by clever deceit.” —George F. Kennan
“I’m not going to assume liberals are stupid, as they do with conservatives. No, I’ll attribute it instead to more fraud and deceit.” —Rush Limbaugh
“The government is so out of control. It is so bloated and infested with fraud and deceit and corruption and abuse of power.” —Ted Nugent
“All deception in the course of life is indeed nothing else but a lie reduced to ractice, and falsehood passing from words into things.” —Robert South
“All deception in the course of life is indeed nothing else but a lie reduced to practice, and falsehood passing from words into things.” —Robert Southey
“There is less misery in being cheated than in that kind of wisdom which perceives, or thinks it perceives, that all mankind are cheats.” —Edwin Hubbel Chapin
“The most deceitful persons spend their lives in blaming deceit, so as to use it on some great occasion to promote some great interest.” —Francois de la Rochefoucauld
“Dissimulation was his masterpiece; in which he so much excelled that men were not ashamed of being deceived but twice by him.” —Edward Hyde, 1st Earl of Clarendon
“False friends are like our shadow, keeping close to us while we walk in the sunshine, but leaving us the instant we cross into the shade.” —Christian N Bovee
“Which I wish to remark— and my language is plain, that for ways that are dark And for tricks that are vain, The heathen Chinee is peculiar.” —Bret Harte
“To unmask the deceit of every instinct for preservation is to procure salvation for humanity in nothingness.. ..Nothingness must be defined as the absense of all willing.” —Maurice Blondel
“There are probably several hundred thousand if we narrow the definition to include only those who in their search for money and power are ruthless and deceitful.” —Henry A. Wallace
“Recollect that the Almighty, who gave the dog to be companion of our pleasures and our toils, hath invested him with a nature noble and incapable of deceit.” —Walter Scott
“It seems to me that there are two kinds of trickery: the ”fronts” people assume before one another’s eyes, and the ”front” a writer puts on the face of reality.” —Francoise Sagan
“The deceit is sometimes unconscious, but not always, since some people, owing to their sectarianism, purposely overlook reality and refuse to acknowledge the inadequacies and the falsity of their beliefs.” —Pierre-Paul Grasse
“Whenever, therefore, people are deceived and form opinions wide of the truth, it is clear that the error has slid into their minds through the medium of certain resemblances to that truth.” —Socrates
“See, in my line of work you got to keep repeating things over and over and over again for the truth to sink in, to kind of catapult the propaganda.” —George W. Bush
“You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all of the time.” —Phineas T. Barnum
“Habitual liars invent falsehoods not to gain any end or even to deceive their hearers, but to amuse themselves. It is partly practice and partly habit. It requires an effort in them to speak truth.” —William Hazlitt
“It is not difficult to deceive the first time, for the deceived possesses no antibodies; unvaccinated by suspicion, she overlooks lateness, accepts absurd excuses, permits the flimsiest patching to repair great rents in the quotidian.” —John Updike
“There comes a time when deceit and defiance must be seen for what they are. At that point, a gathering danger must be directly confronted. At that point, we must show that beyond our resolutions is actual resolve.” —Dick Cheney
“To those who cling to power through corruption and deceit and the silencing of dissent, know that you are on the wrong side of history; but that we will extend a hand if you are willing to unclench your fist.” —Barack Obama
“If we take shelter of the lotus feet of the spiritual master, we can become free from illusion, fear and distress. If we wholeheartedly beg for his mercy without any deceit then the spiritual master bestows all auspiciousness upon us.” —Bhaktisiddhanta Sarasvati
“I am convinced that human life is filled with many pure, happy, serene examples of insincerity, truly splendid of their kind-of people deceiving one another without (strangely enough) any wounds being inflicted, of people who seem unaware even that they are deceiving one another.” —Osamu Dazai
“The institutions of college athletics exist primarily as unreality fueled by deceit. The unreality is that universities should be in the business of providing large spectacles of mass entertainment. The fundamental absurdity of that notion requires the promulgation of the various deceits necessary to carry it out.” —Charlie Pierce
“Forging differs from hoaxing, inasmuch as in the later the deceit is intended to last for a time, and then be discovered, to the ridicule of those who have credited it; whereas the forger is one who, wishing to acquire a reputation for science, records observations which he has never made.” —Charles Babbage
“Friendship is by its very nature freer of deceit than any other relationship we can know because it is the bond least affected by striving for power, physical pleasure, or material profit, most liberated from any oath of duty or of constancy. With Eros the body stands naked, in friendship our spirit is denuded.” —Francine du Plessix Gray
“What man so wise, what earthly wit so ware, As to descry the crafty cunning train, By which deceit doth mask in visor fair, And cast her colours dyed deep in grain, To seem like truth, whose shape she well can feign, And fitting gestures to her purpose frame, The guiltless man with guile to entertain? — Edmund Spenser