Imposture Quotes & Sayings

The ambition of superior sensibility and superior eloquence disposes the lovers of arts to receive rapture at one time, and communicate it at another; and each labors first to impose upon himself and then to propagate the imposture. — Samuel Johnson

All imposture weakens confidence and chills benevolence. — Samuel Johnson

Making every allowance for the errors of the most extreme fallibility, the history of Catholicism would on this hypothesis represent an amount of imposture probably unequaled in the annals of the human race. — William Edward Hartpole Lecky

It is not to be understood that I am with him [Jesus] in all his doctrines. I am a Materialist, he takes the side of spiritualism; he preaches the efficacy of repentance toward forgiveness of sin. I require a counterpoise of good works to redeem it ... Among the sayings & discourses imputed to him by his biographers, I find many passages of fine imagination, correct morality, and of the most lovely benevolence: and others again of so much ignorance, so much absurdity, so much untruth, charlatanism, and imposture, as to pronounce it impossible that such contradictions should have proceeded from the same being.
[Letter to William Short, 13 April 1820] — Thomas Jefferson

A book which the Mohammedans foolishly believe to have been written by divine inspiration, but which Christians know to be a wicked imposture, contradictory to the Holy Scriptures. — Ambrose Bierce

If, after a rigid examination, it be found an imposition, it should be extensively published to the world as such; the evidences and arguments on which the imposture was detected, should be clearly and logically stated, that those who have been sincerely yet unfortunately deceived, may perceive the nature of the deception and be reclaimed, and that those who continue to publish the delusion, may be exposed and silenced ... — Orson Pratt

A man who is a politician at forty is a statesman at three score and ten. It is at this age, when he would be too old to be a clerk or a gardener or a police-court magistrate, that he is ripe to govern a country. This is not so strange when you reflect that from the earliest times the old have rubbed it into the young that they are wiser than they, and before the young had discovered what nonsense this was they were old too, and it profited them to carry on the imposture ... — W. Somerset Maugham

For power can guarantee the interests of some men but it can never foster the good of man. Power always protects the good of some at the expense of all the others. Only love can attain and preserve the good of all. Any claim to build the security of all on force is a manifest imposture. — Thomas Merton

I tell you, stupidity, self-protective stupidity, is the fundamental sin. No man alive has a right to contentment. No man alive has a right to mental rest. No man has any right to be as stupid as educated, Liberal men have been about that foolish affair at Geneva. Men who have any leisure, any gifts, any resources, have no right to stifle their consciences with that degree of imposture. — H.G.Wells

The essential question was always "Who are these fellows who give us orders? By what warrant? And how do we benefit and how does the world benefit? But they are doing no good to anyone, no real good even to themselves! This is not government and leadership; this is imposture. Why stand it?...Why stand it? — H.G.Wells

When the boys come into my yard for leave to gather horse-chestnuts, I own I enter into nature's game, and affect to grant the permission reluctantly, fearing that any moment they will find out the imposture of that showy chaff. But this tenderness is quite unnecessary; the enchantments are laid on very thick. Their young life is thatched with them. Bare and grim to tears is the lot of the children in the hovel I saw yesterday; yet not the less they hang it round with frippery romance, like the children of the happiest fortune. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Affected simplicity is a subtle imposture. — Francois De La Rochefoucauld

Gravity is of the very essence of imposture; it does not only mistake other things, but is apt perpetually almost to mistake itself. — Anthony Ashley Cooper

The Catholics get rid of the difficulty by setting up an infallible Pope, and consenting formally to accept his verdicts, but the Protestants simply chase their own tails. By depriving revelation of all force and authority, they rob their so-called religion of every dignity. It becomes, in their hands, a mere romantic imposture, unsatisfying to the pious and unconvincing to the judicious. — H.L. Mencken

Libraries are as the shrine where all the relics of the ancient saints, full of true virtue, and that without delusion or imposture, are preserved and reposed. — Francis Bacon

A peculiar side of credulity is that it is often joined with a proneness to imposture. The association of believing and lying is not characteristic solely of children. They inability or unwillingness to see things as they are promotes both gullibility and charlatanism. — Eric Hoffer

I've met at least three Great Beast 666's over the last few years, and not one of them had even one-tenth of the wit, humour, wisdom or panache that I would expect from a figure of Crowleyan proportions. Isn't it curious how those who strive to be someone else are very selective; yes, I can see that you've got the heroin habit and mastered the art of beating up on your 'scarlet women,' but you haven't been extradited [sic] from any countries, you haven't published anything, nor have you climbed any mountains of late. — Phil Hine

A man who does not endeavour to seem more than he is will generally be thought nothing of. We habitually make such large deductions for pretence and imposture that no real merit will stand against them. It is necessary to set off our good qualities with a certain air of plausibility and self-importance, as some attention to fashion is necessary. — William Hazlitt

The fact is, very few of us are real imposters. And it's different from play-acting. Imposterism or imposture comes from the core of your being because there's nothing else there. Your central being never develops a self; that's not a disadvantage, entirely, though you do have to fight for your point of view, almost as if you were dead. — Janet Frame

It was inevitable, as soon as legends of miracles became attached to the names of the great mystics, that the credulous masses should applaud imposture more than true devotion; the cult of the saints, against which orthodox Islam ineffectually protested, promoted ignorance and superstition, and confounded charlatanry with lofty speculation. To live scandalously, to act impudently, to speak unintelligibly - this was the easy highroad to fame, wealth, and power. — A.J. Arberry

I'm struggling at the end to get out of the valley of hectoring youth, journalistic middle age, imposture, moneymaking, public relations, bad writing, mental confusion. — Stephen Spender

The thing is plain. All that men really understand, is confined to a very small compass; to their daily affairs and experience; to what they have an opportunity to know, and motives to study or practice. The rest is affectation and imposture. — William Hazlitt

Invention despoils observations, insinuation invalidates memory. A stewpot of bad habits, all of it - so that imaginative writers wind up, by and large, a shifty crew, sunk in distortion, misrepresentation, illusion, imposture, fakery. — Cynthia Ozick

I sought out the laws which govern nature, solid or ethereal, and after much pondering I perceived that the Universe had not been formed as its pretended Creator would have us believe; I knew that all that exists, exists of itself and not by the caprice of Iahveh; that the world is itself its own creator and the spirit its own God. Henceforth I despised Iahveh for his imposture, and I hated him because he showed himself to be opposed to all that I found desirable and good: liberty, curiosity, doubt. — Anatole France

I am perfectly convinced that I have both seen, and heard in a manner which should make unbelief impossible, things called spiritual which cannot be taken by a rational being to be capable of explanation by imposture, coincidence, or mistake. — Augustus De Morgan

The humorous writer professes to awaken and direct your love, your pity, your kindness
your scorn for untruth, pretension, imposture ... He takes upon himself to be the week-day preacher. — Mark Twain

Among the sayings and discourses imputed to him (i.e. Jesus) by his biographers, I find many passages of fine imagination, correct morality, and of the most lovely benevolence; and others again of so much ignorance, so much absurdity, so much untruth, charlatanism, and imposture, as to pronounce it impossible that such contradictions should have proceeded from the same being. — Thomas Jefferson

When a book is read an irrevocable thing happens - a murder, followed by an imposture. The story in the mind murders the story on the page, and takes its place. — Mike Carey

The number who actually consented to the Constitution of the United States, at the first, was very small. Considered as the act of the whole people, the adoption of the Constitution was the merest farce and imposture, binding upon nobody. — Lysander Spooner

Affected simplicity is an elegant imposture. — Francois De La Rochefoucauld

Admiration is one of the most bewitching, enthusiastic passions of the mind; and every common moralist knows that it arises from novelty and surprise, the inseparable attendants of imposture. — William Warburton

These are no ordinary claims; and it seems hardly possible for a rational being to regard them with even a subdued interest; much less to treat them with mere indifference and contempt. If not true they are little else than the pretensions of a bold imposture, which not satisfied with having already enslaved millions of the human race, seeks to continue its encroachments upon human liberty, until all nations be subjected under its iron rule. — Simon Greenleaf

Actually, the "leap of faith" - to give it the memorable name that Soren Kierkegaard bestowed upon it - is an imposture. As he himself pointed out, it is not a "leap" that can be made once and for all. It is a leap that has to go on and on being performed, in spite of mounting evidence to the contrary. This effort is actually too much for the human mind, and leads to delusions and manias. Religion understands perfectly well that the "leap" is subject to sharply diminishing returns, which is why it often doesn't in fact rely on "faith" at all but instead corrupts faith and insults reason by offering evidence and pointing to confected "proofs." This evidence and these proofs include arguments from design, revelations, punishments, and miracles. Now that religion's monopoly has been broken, it is within the compass of any human being to see these evidences and proofs as the feeble-minded inventions that they are. — Christopher Hitchens

In the verbal conflagration of a Shakespeare and a Shelley we smell the ash of words, backwash and effluvium of an impossible cosmogony. The terms encroach upon each other, as though none could attain the equivalent of the inner dilation; this is the hernia of the image, the transcendent rupture of poor words, born of everyday use and miraculously raised to the heart's altitudes. The truths of beauty are fed on exaggerations which, upon the merest analysis, turn out to be monstrous and meaningless. Poetry: demiurgical divagation of the vocabulary ... Has charlatanism ever been more effectively combined with ecstasy? Lying, the wellspring of all tears! such is the imposture of genius and the secret of art. Trifles swollen to the heavens; the improbable, generator of a universe! In every genius coexists a braggart and a god. — Emil Cioran

Be not frightened at the hard words "imposition," "imposture;" give and ask no questions. Cast thy bread upon the waters. Some have, unawares, entertained angels. — Charles Lamb

Blessed be God, that we live in these latter times - the latter times of the reign of darkness and imposture. Great is our privilege, precious our opportunity, to cooperate with the Saviour in the blessed work of enlarging and establishing his kingdom throughout the world. — Adoniram Judson

Surely it is an excellent plan, when you are seated before delicacies and choice foods, to impress upon your imagination that this is the dead body of a fish, that the dead body of a bird or a pig; and again, that the Falernian wine is grape juice and that robe of purple a lamb's fleece dipped in a shellfish's blood; and in matters of sex intercourse, that it is the attrition of an entrail and a convulsive expulsion of a mere mucus. Surely these are excellent imaginations, going to the heart of actual facts and penetrating them so as to see the kind of things they really are. You should adopt this practice all through your life, and where things make an impression which is very plausible, uncover their nakedness, see into their cheapness, strip off the profession on which they vaunt themselves. For pride is an arch-seducer of reason, and just when you fancy you are most certainly busy in good works, then you are mostly certainly guilty of imposture. — Marcus Aurelius

Do you know, it seems to me that a great deal of nonsense is talked about the dignity of work. Work is a drug that dull people take to avoid the pangs of unmitigated boredom. It has been adorned with fine phrases, because it is a necessity to most men, and men always gild the pill they're obliged to swallow. Work is a sedative. It keeps people quiet and contented. It makes them good material for their leaders. I think the greatest imposture of Christian times is the sanctification of labour. You see, the early Christians were slaves, and it was necessary to show them that their obligatory toil was noble and virtuous. But when all is said and done, a man works to earn his bread and to keep his wife and children; it is a painful necessity, but there is nothing heroic in it. If people choose to put a higher value on the means than on the end, I can only pass with a shrug of the shoulders, and regret the paucity of their intelligence. — W. Somerset Maugham

For the mind of man is far from the nature of a clear and equal glass, wherein the beams of things should reflect according to their true incidence; nay, it is rather like an enchanted glass, full of superstition and imposture, if it be not delivered and reduced. — Francis Bacon

For the first time, Smollett adopted a device that Barbara Foley calls "pseudofactual imposture," a strategy of presentation that we associate with the fictions of Behn, Defoe, and Richardson. — Tobias Smollett

For myself, I found that I was fitted for nothing so well as for the study of Truth; as having a mind nimble and versatile enough to catch the resemblances of things and at the same time steady enough to fix and distinguish their subtler differences; as being gifted by nature with desire to seek, patience to doubt, fondness to meditate, slowness to assert, readiness to consider, carefulness to dispose and set in order; and as being a man that neither affects what is new nor admires what is old, and that hates every kind of imposture. -Francis Bacon — Francis Bacon

Good heavens!" cried the Colonel, laughing, "do you mean to say all our sympathy was wasted and your fit an imposture?" "Speaking professionally, it was admirably done," cried I, looking in amazement at this man who was forever confounding me with some new phase of his astuteness. "It is an art which is often useful, — Arthur Conan Doyle

Villainy, when detected, never gives up, but boldly adds impudence to imposture. — Oliver Goldsmith