Quotes & Sayings About Deviousness

It was not for me, after these last seventy-two hours, to reject as too outlandish the possibility that the situation for him here had driven George crazy. Yet I did reject it. It was just too insipid a conclusion. Not everybody was cray. Resolute is not crazy. Deluded is not crazy. To be thwarted, vengeful, terrified, treacherous
this is not to be crazy. Not even fanatically held illusions are crazy, and deceit certainly isn't crazy
deceit, deviousness, cunning, cynicism, all of that is far from crazy ... and there, that, deceit, there was the key to my confusion. Of course! — Philip Roth

You'd have thought that after suffering such a loss nothing else would matter to her but that didn't seem to be how it worked. She was fearful about everything now. It was as if she had finally seen the awful power of fate, it's deviousness, the way it could wipe out in an instant the one thing you had been certain you could rely on, and now she was constantly looking over her shoulder, trying to work out where the next blow might fall. — Mary Lawson

The business of proving evolution has reached a stage when it is futile for biologists to work merely to discover more and more evidence of evolution. Those who choose to believe that God created every biological species separately in the state we observe them, but made them in a way calculated to lead us to the conclusion that they are the products of an evolutionary development are obviously not open to argument. All that can be said is that their belief is an implicit blasphemy, for it imputes to God an appalling deviousness. — Theodosius Dobzhansky

All our parents have levels of deviousness. We're driven to write about this discrepancy between the bright shining selves they invented and the monsters lurking underneath. — Francine Du Plessix Gray

The division between art and deviousness and crime is sometimes as thin as a cigarette paper. — Robertson Davies

Such letters ... from the FDA, are, filled with objectively demonstrable lies, practiced deceptions and deviousness, red herrings, directed misinformation, misdirected information, etc ... Once FDA-NCI-AMA-ACS ... concedes that Laetrile anti-tumor efficacy was indeed even once observed ... a permanent crack in bureaucratic armor has taken place. — Dean Burk

How? It's obvious. You told me yourself, Lou is like your Bertha - she's an automaton, playing her role, the same role, with me, with you, with one man after the other. The particular man is incidental. She seduced both of us in the same way, with the same female deviousness, the same guile, the same gestures, the same promises!" "And yet this automaton controls you. She dominates your mind: you worry about her opinion, you pine for her touch." "No. No pining. No longer. What I feel now is rage. — Irvin D. Yalom

They didn't mention the jealousy their love of each other had bred in him, that had flourished into deviousness and cruelty. The pain the day had brought would not easily pass, both were aware of that. And yet it had to be, since it was part of what there was. — William Trevor

I have been thinking for some time of writing a piece called: In Pursuit of the Working-Class. My life has been spent in pursuit. So has everyone's, of course. I chase love and fame all the time. I have chased, off and on, and with much greater deviousness of approach, the working-class and the English. The pursuit of the working-class is shared by everyone with the faintest tint of social responsibility: some of the most indefatigable pursuers are working-class people. That is because the phrase does n — Doris Lessing

Allow me to presume upon this new friendship of ours by telling you that denying your fiance your company in order to gain whatever it is you want, is not only foolish but risky. It was obvious to me that his grace has a great affection for you, and I truly think he would give you anything you want if you simply gave him that lovely smile of yours and asked him for it. Deceit and deviousness do you no credit, my child, and what's more, they will get you absolutely nowhere with the duke. He has known females far more skilled in deception and trickery than you, and all those ladies ever got from him was the opportunity to amuse him for a very brief time. While you, by being direct and forthright as I sense that you are, have gained the very thing those other females most desired. You have gained the offer of his grace's hand in marriage.
-Dr. Whitticomb — Judith McNaught

Do women feel anything more keenly than curiosity? No, they will go to any lengths to find out, to know,to feel, what they have always dreamed of! Once their excited curiosity has been aroused, women will stoop to anything, commit any folly, take any risks. They stop at nothing. I am speaking of women who are real women, who operate on three different levels. Superficially cool and rational, they have three secret compartments: the first is constantly full of womanly fret and anxiety; the second is a sort of innocent guile, like the fearsome sophistry of the self-righteous; and the last is filled with an engaging dishonesty, a charming deviousness, a consummate duplicity, with all those perverse qualities in fact that can drive a foolish, unwary love to suicide, but which by others may be judged quite delightful. — Guy De Maupassant

We admire Freud for his serious dedication, his willingness to retract, the stylistic tentativeness of some of his assertions, his lifelong review of his pet notions. We admire him for his very deviousness, his hedging,s and his misgivings, because they seem to make him more of an honest scientist, reflecting truthfully the infinite manifold of reality. But this is to admire him for the wrong reason. A basic cause for his own lifelong twistings was that he would never cleanly leave the sexual dogma, never clearly see or admit that the terror of death was the basic repression. — Ernest Becker

I hate to admit it, but governmental deviousness is usually better explained by incompetence, vanity, and the need to protect one's job at all costs. — Jasper Fforde