Quotes & Sayings About Deception

Geographically speaking, you can't get to where you want to be unless you know where you are the begin with. You need a reference point. Similarly, you can't get to where you want to be in life until you are willing to admit where you are to begin with. Self-deception makes that next to impossible. — Andy Stanley

The demagogue is usually sly, a detractor of others, a professor of humility and disinterestedness, a great stickler for equality as respects all above him, a man who acts in corners, and avoids open and manly expositions of his course, calls blackguards gentlemen, and gentlemen folks, appeals to passions and prejudices rather than to reason, and is in all respects, a man of intrigue and deception, of sly cunning and management. — James F. Cooper

As in everything else, I must start with myself. That is: in all circumstances try to be decent, just, tolerant, and understanding, and at the same time try to resist corruption and deception. In other words, I must do my utmost to act in harmony with my conscience and my better self. — Vaclav Havel

As soon as jealousy is discovered, it is regarded by the person who is its object as a challenge which justifies deception. — Marcel Proust

The sword of the Spirit - the Bible - is the weapon God has provided for us to use in this battle between truth and deception. Make it a priority to wield that sword skillfully. — Billy Graham

When we successfully deceive others, they are not aware of it; the same is true with self-deception. — Mardy Grothe

We all practice self-deception to a degree; no man can handle complete honesty without being cut at each turn. There's not enough room in a man's head for sanity alongside each grief, each worry, each terror that he owns. I'm well used to burying such things in a dark cellar and moving on. — Mark Lawrence

In love deceit almost always outstrips distrust. — Francois De La Rochefoucauld

Every man has three worlds. What he perceives, what he shows to the world and his reality. The third one is the mystery to be lived. — Harshit Walia

Deceit and violence - these are the two forms of deliberate assault on human beings. — Sissela Bok

Everyday in the heat, rain and cold, I ran, alone in the woods ... in the hills near our home. There I felt the gentle touch of God. And I heard His whisper, You're stronger now. It's time to tell the truth of what happened. Tell your story to give someone hope. — Nikki Rosen

It is quite as ignominious to allow oneself to be deceived as to deceive. — Christina, Queen Of Sweden

Deception wasn't Tricia's strongpoint. Not when she'd been seven and blamed Angelica for a vase she'd broken, nor when coming up with excuses to avoid dating high school jocks who couldn't spell, let alone comprehend, Sherlock Holmes. — Lorna Barrett

Flirtation and coquetry are so nearly allied as to be identical; both are the art of successful and pleasing deception. — Louise Colet

To know how to disguise is the knowledge of kings. — Cardinal Richelieu

We had been assured by our elders that intelligence was a family trait. All my kin and forebears were people of substantial or remarkable intellect, thought somehow none of them had prospered in the world. Too bookish, my grandmother said with tart pride, and Lucille and I read constantly to forestall criticism, anticipating failure. If my family were not as intelligent as we were pleased to pretend, this was an innocent deception, for it was a matter of indifference to everybody whether we were intelligent or not. People always interpreted our slightly formal manner and our quiet tastes as a sign that we wished to stay a little apart. This was a matter of indifference, also, and we had our wish. — Marilynne Robinson

The preachers and lecturers deal with men of straw, as they are men of straw themselves. Why, a free-spoken man, of sound lungs, cannot draw a long breath without causing your rotten institutions to come toppling down by the vacuum he makes. Your church is a baby-house made of blocks, and so of the state.
... The church, the state, the school, the magazine, think they are liberal and free! It is the freedom of a prison-yard. — Henry David Thoreau

I am quite willing to admit that they are also a deception but right now I believe in them so much that I infect them with truth. — Vladimir Nabokov

2. "HOW COULD anything originate out of its opposite? For example, truth out of error? or the Will to Truth out of the will to deception? or the generous deed out of selfishness? or the pure sun-bright vision of the wise man out of covetousness? Such genesis is impossible; whoever dreams of it is a fool, nay, worse than a fool; things of the highest value must have a different origin, an origin of THEIR own - in this transitory, seductive, illusory, paltry world, in this turmoil of delusion and cupidity, they cannot have their source. But rather in the lap of Being, in the intransitory, in the concealed God, in the 'Thing-in-itself - THERE must be their source, and nowhere else!" - — Friedrich Nietzsche

The self-deception of slave owners and proponents of slavery is well documented by the historians Eugene Genovese and Elizabeth Fox-Genovese in their book Fatal Self-Deception: Slaveholding Paternalism in the Old South. Slavery was not perceived by most slaveholders in the nineteenth century to be an exploitation of humans by other humans for economic gain; instead, slaveholders painted a portrait of slavery as a paternalistic and benign institution in which the slaves themselves were seen as not so different from all laborers - black and white - who toiled everywhere in both free and slave states; further, the South's "Christian slavery" was claimed to be superior. — Michael Shermer

Who do you think is lying to us?" Shevek demanded.
Placid, Bedap met his gaze. "Who, brother? Who but ourselves? — Ursula K. Le Guin

Deception is a sort of seduction. In love and war, adultery and espionage, deceit can only succeed if the deceived party is willing, in some way, to be deceived. — Ben Macintyre

You are believing not in your god but in yourself if your god knows no better than you do ... and yet, in this alone, I am afraid, you have already been fooling yourself. — Criss Jami

Make no mistake, hiding one's true self away in a closet and creating a facade of heterosexuality is not without its consequences. It may appear to have a degree of safety but from my experience they are very unhealthy places and do all kinds of terrible things to individuals psychologically, emotionally and behaviourally ... to say nothing of projection. The damage of the fear, shame, guilt and self-loathing that exist inside a closet are often reflected unknowingly in the external life of the individual. In or out of the closet; there is a price to pay. Each individual must weigh up the consequences of honesty, openness, secrecy and deception for themselves. Coming out, for most of us, is like an exorcism that releases us of the darkness we have lived in for years and caused us to believe awful things about ourselves. On the other side of the looking glass are freedom, light and life. — Anthony Venn-Brown

Our life-style contains more Thanatos than Eros, for egotism, exploitation, deception, obsession and addiction have more place in us than eroticism, joy, generosity and spontaneity. — Germaine Greer

Subconsciously he knew why it was happening, but a truth suppressed is a reality ignored. — Luke Montgomery

In the presence of an overwhelming sincerity on the part of the disinherited, the dominant themselves are caught with no defense [ ... ] They are thrown back upon themselves for their rating. — Howard Thurman

This explained to me
and I suppose, forgave me
my inability to see the face of this man, because whoever must deceive us in order to live will by necessity far exceed the skill of ordinary men, who are as much tempted by the desire to be honest as they are plagued by guilt and shame when they have broken faith. — Michael Ennis

Man may deceive his fellow-men, deception may follow deception, and the children of the wicked one may have power to seduce the foolish and untaught, till naught but fiction feeds the many, and the fruit of falsehood carries in its current the giddy to the grave; but one touch with the finger of his love, yes, one ray of glory from the upper world, or one word from the mouth of the Savior, from the bosom of eternity, strikes it all into insignificance, and blots it forever from the mind. (Messenger and Advocate Oct 1934 pp 14-16) — Oliver Cowdery

It is one of the dangerous self-deceptions of our society to pretend that mechanisms of control do not really exist, and to maintain, without qualification, that we are an economically "free" people. — Robert Heilbroner

To benefit by others' killing and to delude oneself into the belief that one is being very religions and nonviolent is sheer self-deception. — Mahatma Gandhi

Nationalism is power hunger tempered by self-deception. — George Orwell

Until you realize how easily it is for your mind to be manipulated, you remain the puppet of someone else's game. — Evita Ochel

It's always the 'others' who are deceived. — Marty Rubin

Seldom, very seldom, does complete truth belong to any human disclosure; seldom can it happen that something is not a little disguised or a little mistaken. — Jane Austen

Let us not play at kittly-benders. There is a solid bottom everywhere. — Henry David Thoreau

Certainly, it seems true enough that there's a good deal of irony in the world ... I mean, if you live in a world full of politicians and advertising, there's obviously a lot of deception. — Kenneth Koch

Perhaps the most tragic way that self-deception harms us is that we start believing our lies and we teach them to others. — Cortney S. Warren

All the time when I speak to you, even now, I'm saying not precisely what I think, but what will impress you and make you respond. That's so even between us - and how much more it's so where there are stronger motives for deception. In fact, one's so used to this one hardly sees it. The whole language is a machine for making falsehoods. — Iris Murdoch

Someone who lies for you will also lie to you. The occasional benefit your business may gain from a successful deception or concealment is always outweighed by the encouragement it provides to those willing to risk trust for success. — Michael Josephson

If you don't want to deceive yourself in this new year, don't be a miracle chaser — Sunday Adelaja

The new freedom of expression brought by the Internet goes far beyond politics. People relate to each other in new ways, posing questions about how we should respond to people when all that we know about them is what we have learned through a medium that permits all kinds of anonymity and deception. — Peter Singer

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

Because our hearts are unprepared for truth, we cling to the deception as a shipwreck victim on a storm-tossed sea will grab at anything that floats. But the splintered rubble of our broken trust - those temporary buoys of our shattered dreams - betray us, gouging rough gashes into our souls, drawing our blood and leaving us to sink. — Penelope J. Stokes

When all is a facade, wound within webs of deception, the truth is what you make of it. — R.A. Salvatore

Faith in life, in oneself, in others must be built on the hard rock of realism; that is to say, on the capacity to see evil where it is, to see swindle, destructiveness, and selfishness not only when they are obvious but in their many disguises and rationalizations. Indeed, faith, love, and hope must go together with such a passion for seeing reality in all its nakedness that the outsider would be prone to call the attitude 'cynicism.' And cynical it is, when we mean by it the refusal to be taken in by the sweet and plausible lies that cover almost everything that is said and believed. But this kind of cynicism is not cynicism; it is uncompromisingly critical, a refusal to play the game in a system of deception. — Erich Fromm

Lucifer is a master at gradual deception. — Joseph B. Wirthlin

Make an effort with tenacity to make real impact that works and don't just create an impression with deception — Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

All warfare is based on deception. — Sun Tzu

In the horrifying calculus of self-deception, the greater the pain we inflict on others, the greater the need to justify it to maintain our feelings of decency and self-worth. — Carol Tavris

I am home, you soggy-faced, entitled little prick, he barely stopped himself saying. You think it took northern sorcery to make me the way I am now? You think it took a war? Those things were tonic compared to what came before. Desperation and deception were waiting for me at the nursery door, took me by either hand as I walked out into my youth, have been my constant companions since. — Richard K. Morgan

What we are probably given is a mixture of truth and untruth. It's anybody's guess as to which part is which and how much there is of each. — Ira Levin

Man's unconscious believes that it must use deception and self-deception to allow the conscious mind to survive and justify itself within our material realm. To do this it must eliminate vast amounts of information form man's conscious mind. Deception and self-deception are the methods it uses to eliminate this information. — D.R. Cozen

Sometimes I think the urge to believe in our own worldview is our most powerful intellectual imperative, the mind's equivalent of feeding, fighting, and fornicating. People will eagerly twist facts into wholly unrecognizable shapes to fit them into existing suppositions. They'll ignore the obvious, select the irrelevant, and spin it all into a tapestry of self-deception, solely to justify an idea, no matter how impoverished or self-destructive. — Barry Eisler

There might be a deceptive tendency to believe that a life born into a world of plenty should be better, more really a life than one which consists in a struggle against scarcity. — Ortega Y Gasset

Crime isn't pretty, only fashionably dressed. — S.W. Frank

Investors are sometimes too busy looking for profits to notice where the truth ends and the deception begins. — Andrew Ross Sorkin

The Chinese general Sun Tzu said that all war was based on deception. Oscar Wilde said the same thing of romance. — Marco Tempest

Slowly I discovered that writing was my way of coping with chaos and my cry of freedom, my homage to beauty. Because stories have the power to denounce, to teach, to inspire, sometimes to heal. That was a kind of epiphany and so I decided that being a writer would be my way to keep on keeping on and that words would be my bullets, my answers to the Weapons of Mass Deception. From that day on my conscience was at ease and growing old more endurable. And I knew I could 'look up and see the sky'. — Vittorio Vandelli

It is only when we have the courage to face things exactly as they are, without any self-deception or illusion, that a light will develop out of events, by which the path to success may be recognized. — Debbie Ford

Megan's deception is another hook on which I can hang my conscience. — Jenny Lloyd

Deceit is a kind of garment that conceals the soul. It might even be compared to a whole wardrobe, so many are its guises. — Maria Montessori

Sometimes truth is costly but not nearly as costly as deception. — Beth Moore

God has not left us defenseless against the devil's strategies of deception. If Satan's weapon of attack is intellectual deception, then our defense and counterattack consist in truth. — Vincent Cheung

Above all, don't lie to yourself. The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to a point that he cannot distinguish the truth within him, or around him, and so loses all respect for himself and for others. And having no respect he ceases to love. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Do you know how many acres of beautiful forests and moors have been destroyed by your company? How many animals have lost their homes and how many trees have been murdered? I am sick of being bothered by you people. — Emily Arden

It is a self-deception of philosophers and moralists to imagine that they escape decadence by opposing it. That is beyond their will; and, however little they acknowledge it, one later discovers that they were among the most powerful promoters of decadence. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Marcie: I know you're still wounded. Danny, you have to let it go. That is what this mind game is all about, discovering who we are.
Humans lie to themselves all the time. There should be no disgrace in being human, that is what I believe. — Andrew Neff

In order to deceive others, it is necessary also to deceive oneself. The actor playing Hamlet must indeed believe that he is the Prince of Denmark, though when he leaves the stage he will usually remember who he really is. On the other hand, when someone's entire life is based on pretense, they will seldom if ever return to reality. That is the secret of successful politicians, evangelists and confidence tricksters - they believe that they are telling the truth, even when they know that they have faked the evidence. Sincerity, my dear Julia, is a quality not to be trusted. — Sarah Caudwell

We cannot separate doubt from deception. Doubt robs a man of his confidence; it is a fearful thing. Offer him deception to restore that confidence and he will embrace the falsehood for the comfort it brings. If you would deceive, begin with doubt. — D.A. Blankinship

Except for a handful, chess players don't have such illusions. The game has a severe analytic quality that makes self-deception difficult. Unlike the undiscovered poet who, despite the harsh criticism of his peers, lives on his fantasies for the day that he will be recognized as the next Dylan Thomas, even a young chess player can usually gauge his talent. When Josh was six, he played several games against a pudgy thirteen-year-old who was the top player on his high school team. He beat Josh every time, but a couple of the games were close, and afterwards the boy seemed gloomy about his performance. He explained that if he didn't make significant improvement during the next year, he would wind up as just another wood-pusher. Despite his celebrity in school, he seemed to know that he didn't have it. While — Fred Waitzkin

The worst of all deceptions is self-deception. — Plato

Medicine labours to restore 'natural' structure or 'normal' function. But greed, egoism, self-deception,and self-pity are not abnormal in the same sense as astigmatism or a floating kidney. For who, in Heaven's name, would describe as natural or normal any man from whom these failings were wholly absent? 'Natural,' if you like, in a quite different sense; archnatural, unfallen. We have only seen one such Man. And he was not at all like the psychologist's picture of the integrated, balanced, adjusted, happily married, employed, popular citizen. You can't really be 'well adjusted' to your world if it says 'you havea devil' and ends by nailing you up naked to a stake of wood. — C.S. Lewis

Who was this girl who thumbed her nose at two kingdoms and did as she pleased? — Mary E. Pearson

The regular I both feared and salivated to see was names Reyes Farrow. Where others exuded aggression, deception, and insecurity, he literally dripped confidence, sex, and power. Mostly sex. — Darynda Jones

Freedom like charity, begins at home. No man is worthy to fight in the cause of freedom unless he has conquered his internal masters. He must learn control and discipline over the disastrous passions that would lead him to folly and ruin. He must conquer inordinate vanity and anger, self-deception, fear, and inhibition. — Jack Whiteside Parsons

The English language has 112 words for deception, according to one count, each with a different shade of meaning: collusion, fakery, malingering, self-deception, confabulation, prevarication, exaggeration, denial. — Robin Marantz Henig

Authenticity was the key to any deception.
Sometimes authenticity was disgusting. — Jodi Meadows

A marriage based on full confidence, based on complete and unqualified frankness on both sides; they are not keeping anything back; there's no deception underneath it all. If I might so put it, it's an agreement for the mutual forgiveness of sin. — Henrik Ibsen

[ ... ]patience is the weapon that forces deception to reveal itself. It is the insurance against being deceived or making wrong decisions. Some things can only be made known by waiting. God takes his time. — Michelle McKinney Hammond

I hate deception, even where the imagination only is concerned. — George Washington

Almost all the time, you tell yourself you're loving somebody when you're just using them. — Chuck Palahniuk

I wanted to get away from him before he led me into talking, before he made me feel angry, or grieved, or jealous all over again. I did not want to feel anything for him, not desire, not resentment. I wanted to be cold to him, so I turned on my heel and started to walk away. — Philippa Gregory

The American people, Neil, are sick and tired of excuses. They are sick and tired of the blame game. And they're sick and tired of the deception coming from this president and this administration. This is why I believe that I am doing so well in the polls. — Herman Cain

There is nothing more deceptive than an obvious fact. — Arthur Conan Doyle

If there's one thing every good novelist understands, it's that our inner world is unreliable and yet there's no getting beyond it. Every sense is subject to deception, including the moral sense. What seems at first like the hard surface of spiritual reality is really fathomless when you dive down into it. There is no bottom. We neve know anything for sure. (p. xvi) — Andrew Klavan

Some women are good-looking ... until they change their hairstyle. — Mokokoma Mokhonoana

A joke is a good camouflage. Next best comes sentiment ... But the best camouflage of all - in my opinion - is the plain and simple truth. Because nobody ever believes it. — Max Frisch

We live in imaginary, virtual worlds created by corporations that profit from our deception. — Chris Hedges

I'm really interested in self-deception. Really interested in how people live in bubble universes. How people can fail to see the seemingly obvious. — Errol Morris

The gift of words is the gift of deception and illusion. — Frank Herbert

He was standing so close to her that he detected the faint fragrance of lemons in her hair. He sensed rather than felt the stiffness of her body. Was she remembering the blistering heat of their lovemaking? He had suffered for hours afterward, his loins aching viciously, his hands itching for the feel of her soft, silken flesh. It had not been easy to leave her that night. Yet he hadn't been able to take her innocence under false pretenses.
Someday he would be back in her arms, with no deception between them. And the next time, no power in Heaven or hell would be enough to stop him. — Lisa Kleypas

And we all know love is a glass which makes even a monster appear fascinating. — Alberto Moravia

Love is selflessly honest, even if it comes from deception. — Saurabh Dudeja

You see, I've read Mr. Grumbine's treatise on auras, and while it does depend on the shade, a green aura can be a mark of deception or dishonesty."
I shoot Kiernan a smug glance. While I'm certain this aura stuff is total bunk, he and Prudence both see the light as green. "Does this Mr. Grumbine say anything about blue auras?"
"Again, it depends on the shade. But it's usually associated with truth. — Rysa Walker

Becoming aware of the intense suffering of billions of animals, and of our own participation in that suffering, can bring up painful emotions: sorrow and grief for the animals; anger at the injustice and deception of the system; despair at the enormity of the problem; fear that trusted authorities and institutions are, in fact, untrustworthy; and guilt for having contributed to the problem. Bearing witness means choosing to suffer. Indeed, empathy is literally 'feeling with.' Choosing to suffer is particularly difficult in a culture that is addicted to comfort
a culture that teaches that pain should be avoided whenever possible and that ignorance is bliss. We can reduce our resistance to witnessing by valuing authenticity over personal pleasure, and integration over ignorance. — Melanie Joy

When you are the problem, it's hard to see it. — Marty Rubin

Intelligence is built on deception. Trust nothing. Not even the mirror. — Manreet Sodhi Someshwar

Terrorism and deception are weapons not of the strong, but of the weak. — Mahatma Gandhi

Perhaps there is really nothing else when everything is falling to pieces, I think, except this bit of togetherness and even that is a sweet deception, for when someone else really needs you you cannot follow him or stand by him. I have noticed that often enough in the war when I looked into the face of a dead comrade. Each one of us has his own death and must suffer it alone; no one can help him then. — Erich Maria Remarque