Deception Quotes - Page 25

• 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

  People, Example, Deceit

  Osamu Dazai (1973). “No Longer Human”, p.37, New Directions Publishing

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• We are oftener deceived by being told some truth than no truth.

  Fulke Greville, 1st Baron Brooke

  Deceived

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• Life deceives everyone except the individual who doesn't contemplate it, the individual who demands nothing from it, the individual who serenely accepts its few gifts and serenely makes the most of them.

  Ivan Turgenev

  Life, Demand, Deceiving

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• I have begun drafting a memorandum for the prosecuting authorities, together with all evidence necessary to establish not only the existence of numerous specific instances of scientific or economic fraud in relation to the official "global warming" storyline but also the connections between these instances, and the overall scheme of deception that the individual artifices appear calculated to reinforce.

  Christopher Monckton, 3rd Viscount Monckton of Brenchley

  Together, Connections, Global Warming

  "Making the police state work for you" by Christopher Monckton, www.climatedepot.com. December 15, 2011.

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• We must be very suspicious of the deceptions of the element of time. It takes a good deal of time to eat or to sleep, or to earn ahundred dollars, and a very little time to entertain a hope and an insight which becomes the light of our life.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Hope, Time, Sleep

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (2009). “The Essential Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson”, p.326, Modern Library

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• The more skillful the performance of false cheer, the more pleasing the effect is upon one's public and on that private audience to whom one owes even more.

  Judith Martin

  Cheer, Audience, Performances

  Judith Martin (1982). “Miss Manners' Guide to Excruciatingly Correct Behavior”, Scribner

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• This grossly advertised wonder [Venice], this gold idol with clay feet, this trompe-l'oeil, this painted deception, this cliche-what intelligent iconoclast could fail to experience a destructive impulse in her presence?

  Mary McCarthy

  Intelligent, Idols, Feet

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• If any man thinks to swindle God, he is wrong.

  Pindar

  Men, Thinking, Ifs

  Pindar (1959). “The odes of Pindar”

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• Self-deception is sometimes as necessary a tool as a crowbar.

  Moss Hart

  Self, Tools, Sometimes

  moss hart (1959). “act one”

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• Ultimately the body will rebel. Even if it can be temporarily pacified with the help of drugs, cigarettes or medicine, it usually has the last word because it is quicker to see through self-deception than the mind. We may ignore or deride the messages of the body, but its rebellion demands to be heeded because its language is the authentic expression of our true selves and of the strength of our vitality.

  Alice Miller

  Philosophy, Self, Expression

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• Novel-writing is a bit like deception. You lie as little as you possibly can. That's the way I do it, anyway.

  Joseph O'Neill

  Lying, Writing, Littles

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• Deceit comes in through the ears, but usually leaves through the eyes.

  Baltasar Gracian

  Eye, Deceit, Ears

  "The Art of Worldly Wisdom". Book by Baltasar Gracián. Maxim 282, 1647.

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• There is nothing disastrous in the temporary nature of our ideas. They are always that. But there may very easily be a train of evil in the self-deception which regards them as final. I think God will forgive us our skepticism sooner than our Inquisitions.

  Walter Lippmann

  Thinking, Self, Ideas

  Walter Lippmann (1914). “A Preface to Politics”

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• Dada aimed to destroy the reasonable deceptions of man and recover the natural and unreasonable order.

  Hans Arp

  Men, Order, Natural

  "Abstract Art". Book by Anna Moszynska (p. 66), 1990.

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• If you are often deceived by those around you, you may be sure that you deserve to be deceived; and that instead of railing at the general falseness of mankind, you have first to pronounce judgment on your own jealous tyranny, or on your own weak credulity.

  Arthur Helps

  Jealous, May, Firsts

  Sir Arthur Helps (1883). “Thoughts in the Cloister and the Crowd”

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• In the form of the oeuvre, the actual circumstances are placed in another dimension where the given reality shows itself as that which it is. Thus it tells the truth about itself; its language ceases to be that of deception, ignorance, and submission. Fiction calls the facts by their name and their reign collapses; fiction subverts everyday experience and shows it to be mutilated and false.

  Herbert Marcuse

  Ignorance, Reality, Names

  Herbert Marcuse (2012). “One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society”, p.62, Beacon Press

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• As if goaded by a kind of frantic despair, I sketched these dirty, ragged little victims of the war with their bruised, lacerated minds and bodies, their matted hair and runny noses. Here my life as a painter began in earnest.

  Walter Keane

  War, Dirty, Hair

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• For many years I had allowed my second husband to take credit for my paintings. But one day, unable to continue the deception any longer, I left him and my home in California and moved to Hawaii.

  Margaret Keane

  Husband, Home, Years

  "Everything You Need To Know About Margaret & Walter Keane, Tim Burton’s Latest Obsession" by Katherine Brooks, www.huffingtonpost.com. September 23, 2014.

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• Consciousness is a singular of which the plural is unknown. There is only one thing and that which seems to be a plurality is merely a series of different aspects of this one thing, produced by a deception, the Indian maya, as in a gallery of mirrors.

  Erwin Schrodinger

  Mirrors, Different, Consciousness

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• The first sign of corruption in a society that is still alive is that the end justifies the means.

  Georges Bernanos

  Mean, Tyrants, Alive

  Georges Bernanos (1955). “Last essays”

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• If we lived in a state where virtue was profitable, common sense would make us saintly. But since we see that avarice, anger, pride and stupidity commonly profit far beyond charity, modesty, justice and thought, perhaps we must stand fast a little, even at the risk of being heroes.

  Thomas More

  Trust, Betrayal, Hero

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• Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible. He is a kind of confidence man, preying on people's vanity, ignorance or loneliness, gaining their trust and betraying them without remorse.

  Janet Malcolm

  Trust, Betrayal, Loneliness

  The Journalist and the Murderer pt. 1 (1990)

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• Flattery is often a traffic of mutual meanness, where although both parties intend deception, neither are deceived.

  Charles Caleb Colton

  Party, Flattery, Traffic

  Charles Caleb Colton (1836). “Lacon: Or, Many Things in Few Words, Addressed to Those who Think”, p.439

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• Feynman's cryptic remark, "no one is that much smarter ...," to me, implies something Feynman kept emphasizing: that the key to his achievements was not anything "magical" but the right attitude, the focus on nature's reality, the focus on asking the right questions, the willingness to try (and to discard) unconventional answers, the sensitive ear for phoniness, self-deception, bombast, and conventional but unproven assumptions.

  Philip Warren Anderson

  Nature, Attitude, Science

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• James says that you deceive yourself if you only hear the Word but do not do it. How many people live in this deception their whole life-hearing and hearing, but never even trying to do what they hear!

  Johan Oscar Smith

  Life Changing, People, Trying

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