Subterfuge Quotes

• But that afternoon he asked himself, with his infinite capacity for illusion, if such pitiless indifference might not be a subterfuge for hiding the torments of love.

  Gabriel Garcia Marquez

  Memorable, Unrequited Love, Heartbreaking

  95 Copy quote

• The right thing to do never requires any subterfuge, it is always simple and direct.

  Calvin Coolidge

  Simple, Accountability, Political

  27 Copy quote

• It is better to be defeated standing for a high principle than to run by committing subterfuge.

  Grover Cleveland

  Running, Principles, Defeated

  15 Copy quote

• Humility is often only feigned submission which people use to render others submissive. It is a subterfuge of pride which lowers itself in order to rise.

  Francois de La Rochefoucauld

  Humility, Pride, Order

  22 Copy quote

• nobody can save you but yourself. you will be put again and again into nearly impossible situations. they will attempt again and again through subterfuge, guise and force to make you submit, quit and/or die quietly inside. nobody can save you but yourself

  Charles Bukowski

  Impossible Situations, Quitting, Force

  Charles Bukowski (2009). “sifting through the madness for the word, the line, the way: New Poems”, p.393, Zondervan

  11 Copy quote

  Show source

• Our contemporary brand of socialism has one fatal flaw. It's too expensive. When you try to shower benefits on so many recipients, you eventually must resort to subterfuge. Foremost among those tricks is money and credit expansion. Inevitably, you debase your currency.

  James Cook

  Trying, Credit, Benefits

  16 Copy quote

• Affect not little shifts and subterfuges to avoid the force of an argument.

  Isaac Watts

  Littles, Patient, Argument

  Isaac Watts (1743). “The Improvement of the Mind”, p.155

  11 Copy quote

  Show source

• Fear is the white lipp'd sire
  Of subterfuge and treachery.

  Lydia Sigourney

  Fear, White, Treachery

  Lydia Howard Sigourney (1841). “Pocahontas, and Other Poems”, p.21

  10 Copy quote

  Show source

• Wrong is wrong; no fallacy can hide it, no subterfuge cover it so shrewdly but that the All-Seeing One will discover and punish it.

  Antoine Rivarol

  Fallacy, Seeing

  9 Copy quote

• There were various aspects of Sun Tzu's approach that appealed to Ho Chi Minh: a) to learn to understand both the enemy and yourself, to seek out his weaknesses and your own strengths, and act accordingly, b) to make ample use of subterfuge and stratagem in order to defeat or disarm your adversary, and c) to use outright violence only when absolutely necessary in the belief that political struggle was more effective than military struggle.

  William J. Duiker

  Military, Struggle, Order

  Source: www.sonshi.com

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• Men who marry for gratification, propagation or the matter of buttons or socks, must expect to cope with and deal in a certain amount of quibble, subterfuge, concealments, and double, deep-dyed prevarication.

  Elbert Hubbard

  Men, Buttons, Matter

  Elbert Hubbard, Bert Hubbard (1923). “Selected writings of Elbert Hubbard: his mintage of wisdom, coined from a life of love, laughter and work”

  9 Copy quote

  Show source

• Whereas, according to the declaration of that true man of the world Talleyrand, the use of language is to conceal the thoughts; this is to declare in the present instance, when I say I am not able to bear much talking, it means really, and without any mistake, or equivocation, or oblique meaning, or implication, or subterfuge, or omission, that I am not able; being at present rather weak in the head, and able to work no more.

  Michael Faraday

  Mistake, Mean, Men

  "Michael Faraday: His Life and Work". Book by Silvanus Phillips Thompson, 1898.

  9 Copy quote

  Show source

• Is the human condition not defined by an endless struggle to control the ego's subterfuges?

  Roméo Dallaire

  Struggle, Ego, Endless

  18 Copy quote

• When I was a child, I did always feel that people were hiding things, and that they weren't expressing their true feelings. When adults are too complicated, and cover their emotions with layers of well-intentioned subterfuge, the child isn't seeing reality clearly enough and gets upset.

  Wallace Shawn

  Children, Reality, People

  "Biography / Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

  9 Copy quote

  Show source

• How do men feel whose whole lives (and many men's lives are) are lies, schemes, and subterfuges? What sort of company do they keep when they are alone? Daily in life I watch men whose every smile is an artifice, and every wink is an hypocrisy. Doth such a fellow where a mask in his own privacy, and to his own conscience?

  William Makepeace Thackeray

  Lying, Men, Hypocrisy

  William Makepeace Thackeray (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of William Makepeace Thackeray (Illustrated)”, p.4165, Delphi Classics

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• It is necessary to be able to withstand all this, to agree to any and every sacrifice, and even - if need be - to resort to all sorts of stratagems, manoeuvres and illegal methods, to evasion and subterfuges in order to penetrate the trade unions, to remain in them, and to carry on Communist work in them at all costs.

  Vladimir Lenin

  Sacrifice, Order, Able

  "V.I. Lenin Selected Works" by Vladimir Lenin, vol. 10, (p. 95), 1938.

  14 Copy quote

  Show source

• There's an honesty to the wolf world that is liberating. There's no diplomacy, no decorum. You tell your enemy you hate him; you show your admiration by confessing the truth. That directness doesn't work with humans, who are masters of subterfuge. Does this dress make me look fat? Do you really love me? Did you miss me? When a person asks this, she doesn't want to know the real answer. She wants you to lie to her. After two years of living with wolves, I had forgotten how many lies it takes to build a relationship.

  Jodi Picoult

  Honesty, Real, Lying

  8 Copy quote

• Youth means love, Vows can't change nature, priests are only men.

  Robert Browning

  Mean, Men, Youth

  'The Ring and the Book' (1868-9) bk. 1, l. 1056

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• No peace was ever won from fate by subterfuge or argument; no peace is ever in store for any of us, but that which we shall win by victory over shame or sin--victory over the sin that oppresses, as well as over that which corrupts.

  John Ruskin

  Peace, Fate, Winning

  8 Copy quote

• We live in our own world , A world that is too small For you to stoop and enter Even on hands and knees, The adult subterfuge.

  R. S. Thomas

  Hands, Adults, World

  R.S. Thomas (2012). “Collected Poems: 1945-1990 R.S.Thomas: Collected Poems : R S Thomas”, p.57, Hachette UK

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Heaven knows insanity was disreputable enough, long ago; but now that the lawyers have got to cutting every gallows rope and picking every prison lock with it, it is become a sneaking villainy that ought to hang and keep on hanging its sudden possessors until evil-doers should conclude that the safest plan was to never claim to have it until they came by it legitimately. The very calibre of the people the lawyers most frequently try to save by the insanity subterfuge ought to laugh the plea out of the courts, one would think.

  Mark Twain

  Cutting, Thinking, Long Ago

  5 Copy quote

• Men felt a chill in their hearts; a damp in their minds. In a desperate effort to snuggle their feelings into some sort of warmth,one subterfuge was tried after anothersentences swelled, adjectives multiplied, lyrics became epics.

  Virginia Woolf

  Heart, Epic, Men

  5 Copy quote

• Take the particular trick of false names. It seems to us particularly odious. We think when we show our contempt for those who use this subterfuge that we are giving them no more than they deserve. It is a meanness which we associate with criminals and vagabonds; a piece of crawling and sneaking...Men whose race is universally known, will unblushingly adopt a false name as a mask, and after a year or two pretend to treat it as an insult if their original and true name be used in its place.

  Hilaire Belloc

  Men, Thinking, Race

  Hilaire Belloc (1922). “The Jews”

  6 Copy quote

  Show source

• [Eva Braun] went to the Nurnberg party rallies starting in 1935. She was there twice and stayed at the Hotel Deutscher Hof, the hotel [Adolf] Hitler had always stayed at while there. It was endless subterfuge in order to see him and then only for a few hours, then she had to sneak back to the banishment of her own room.

  Gretl Braun

  Party, Order, Rooms

  4 Copy quote

• Nobody likes me,” he concluded at the tail end of a ten-minute pity fest. “Can’t imagine why,” Quinn murmured. I turned my snort of laughter into a fake cough, which was an embarrassingly feeble attempt at subterfuge when you consider the fact that I didn’t have any lungs.

  Robin Wasserman

  Laughter, Fake, Tails

  Robin Wasserman (2009). “Skinned”, p.169, Simon and Schuster

  4 Copy quote

  Show source