Quotes & Sayings About Lies And Deception

We are all deceivers to some degree. The difference between safe and unsafe "liars" is that safe people own their lies and see them as a problem to change as they become aware of their deception. — Henry Cloud

They taught the women that the home is a shame and in doing so, they successfully decomposed nations. Instead of it being the greatest honour to build a family, it became a laughingstock. And in this becoming, they successfully deconstructed nations. They taught the men that loyalty is merely an option and in doing so, they successfully destroyed nations. Instead of it being the greatest pride to love one woman, it became a joke, a funny side comment. And in this becoming, they successfully poisoned nations. Your home is your atom, your cell, your genome. Your love is your honour, your word, your truth. You wonder why we live in deconstructed nations, you ask one another why you live on torn fibres, cracked ground, and yet you continue to listen to what they tell you. You have put shame where there should be a throne, you have placed a joke where there should be a crown. You have successfully destroyed your nations. — C. JoyBell C.

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's not enough to be able to lie with a straight face; anybody with enough gall to raise on a busted flush can do that. The first way to lie artistically is to tell the truth - but not all of it. The second way involves telling the truth, too, but is harder: Tell the exact truth and maybe all of it ... but tell it so unconvincingly that your listener is sure you are lying. — Robert A. Heinlein

A man does not marry a girl, nor a woman. He marries a promise, and it shines with a bright purity that is ageless. It shines, in other words, with the glory of lies. The deception is self inflicted. The promise was simple in its form, as befitted the thick-headedness of young men, and in its essence it offered the delusion that the present moment was eternal; that nothing would change; not the fires of desire, not the flesh itself, not the intense look in the eye. — Steven Erikson

Once you take to the habit of deception, every new lie comes that much easier. Though to me it wasn't so much lies as a matter of judicious editing. We all inevitable present a version of ourselves that is a collection of half-truths and exclusions. The way I saw it, the truth was too complicated, whereas the well-chosen lie would put everyone's mind at ease. — Caroline Kettlewell

Know sincere well through the real acts of sincere and not just through its mere words and deceptive actions that end in deep regret before you give your true heart to sincere. So many people have trusted because of sincere but they only saw the mere word and image of sincere and not the real meaning and action of sincere! — Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

And the German society of eighty million people had been shielded against reality and factuality by exactly the same means, the same self-deception, lies, and stupidity that had now become engrained in Eichmann's mentality. These lies changed from year to year, and they frequently contradicted each other; moreover, they were not necessarily the same for the various branches of the Party hierarchy or the people at large. But the practice of self-deception had become so common, almost a moral prerequisite for survival, that even now, eighteen years after the collapse of the Nazi regime, when most of the specific content of its lies has been forgotten, it is sometimes difficult not to believe that mendacity has become an integral part of the German national character. — Hannah Arendt

Lesson number one in trying to develop the ability of independent thought: Understand that EVERYTHING the government says has the potential to be lies and deception. You can believe it's the truth only after you question, exhaust every avenue, and find that their story checks out. If you're a patriot, it's your duty to always question your government anyway, at every turn. A patriot is loyal to his country and his countrymen, not his government. — Derek R. Audette

I did worry at one stage that all my stories seem to revolve around secrets, lies and self-deception, but then I realized that most of human life revolves around those things too, so obviously they were going to feature hugely in anything I wrote. I write about people, so my novels are going to be as different as people are, but with the same core desires, hopes and fears that we all share. — Jane Lovering

Because deception requires both bold lies and lies of omission, it stains the soul, muddies the conscience, blurs the vision, and puts you at risk of headlong descent into greater darkness. As a boy, I could not have put — Dean Koontz

One cannot properly drink without self-deception: the lips have to deny the liquor that just passed down the throat. It was surely for the relief of drunkards that the Lord God did not write upon the stone tablets the commandment: thou shalt not lie. The word has to deny the addiction. Among the tribe of alcoholics, lying is a badge of honor - the truth is first an indiscretion, later an affront, and finally a source of despair. If you truly drink, you have to announce to all and sundry that you do not drink; if you admit you drink, that means you do not truly drink. True all-out drinking has to be concealed; anyone who reveals it is giving in, confessing to helplessness, and all that remains for him is weeping, the gnashing of teeth, and the 12 step program. — Jerzy Pilch

Journalists usually treat anything as true if someone in a position of ostensible authority is willing to say it, even anonymously (and if no one is going to sue over it). The accuracy of anyone's statement, particularly if that person is a public official, is often deemed irrelevant. If no evidence is available for an argument a journalist wishes to include in a story, then up pop weasel words such as "it seems" or "some claim" to enable inclusion of the argument, no matter how shaky its foundation in reality. What's more, too many journalists believe that their job description does not require them to adjudicate between competing claims of truth. Sure, there are "two sides" - and only two sides - to every story, according to the rules of objectivity. But if both sides wish to deploy lies and other forms of deliberate deception for their own purposes, well, that's somebody else's problem. — Eric Alterman

The problem with holiness is that once we look into the face of it we are no longer capable of taking that which is odious and filthy and somehow pretending that it's translucent and clean. In other words, we have to do one of the most revolting things possible; we have to face ourselves. — Craig D. Lounsbrough

I don't think you fully appreciate the importance of Illusion in life, the Essential Nature of Lies and Deception of the body politic. — H.G.Wells

She had come into the garden expecting summer roses and had instead been caught in a bank of twisted, thorny, frostbitten vines. — Nenia Campbell

Deceptions and lies reign in a country where focus is on messages of miracles and wonders — Sunday Adelaja

They were Catholic, my lovers,
All in an access of crossing themselves,
Particularly their fingers
Behind their suspendered backs
And that was the women. — Shay Caroline

To find out if she really loved me, I hooked her up to a lie detector. And just as I suspected, my machine was broken. — Dark Jar Tin Zoo

Understood what the books and the generals always repeated: that armies did not kill each other, they broke each other, that the day would be won when one army believed it could not survive. A matter of deception, of conviction, of lies made true through performance. Like everything else. — Seth Dickinson

So it was a crossroads summer, when the universe seemed to stand perilously still like an egg wobbling on a precipice, a regular rite of passage summer that saw us traverse the hazardous divide between the illusions of boyhood and the far more pernicious deceptions of maturity, et cetera. — Sol Luckman

... Faustus ... dared to confirm he had advanced beyond the level of a scarlet sinner - he was a conscious follower of the Prince of Darkness. The fact he could publicly project an Antichrist image with pride, having no fear of reprisal, and his seeming diabolical art of escaping all punishment when others who were considered heretics had burned at the stake for less, would certainly signal that an unnatural individual walked in their midst. It is true in many respects he assumed the role of the charlatan, yet how apropos, considering his willingness to follow his 'brother-in-law' known as the Father of Lies and deception. — E.A. Bucchianeri

I realize that our world has come full circle. That, for all the pain and suffering, for all the lies and deception, that everything is as it should be. That the journey doesn't dictate the end. We do. Our choices determine the shape and path of our life. — M. Leighton

I looked at Mum and realized
twang!
that she was telling an untruth. A big untruth. And I remember thinking in that instant how thrilling and grown-up it must be to say something so completely untrue, as opposed to the little amateur fibs I was already practiced at
horrid little apprentice sinner that I was
like the ones about you'd already said your prayers or washed under the fingernails. Yes, I was impressed. I too must learn to say these gorgeous untruths. Imaginary kings and queens would be my houseguests when I was older. — Christopher Buckley

It's not that I've 'faked my own death' as the saying goes. Maybe it's that I've 'faked my own life,' and in doing so I've yet to realize how dead I really am. — Craig D. Lounsbrough

The process [of mass-media deception] has to be conscious, or it would not be carried out with sufficient precision, but it also has to be unconscious, or it would bring with it a feeling of falsity and hence of guilt ... To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies all this is indispensably necessary. — George Orwell

You know, everything's a sort of lie, and then you die. — Arthur K. Flam

It occurred to us, from observation and from reasonin, that extra marital sex was not what really destroyed marriages, but rather the lies and deception that invariably accompanied it
that was the culprit. Page 317 — Ossie Davis Ruby Dee

It is the dirt within men's hearts that is most offensive; the filth you cannot see. — Jocelyn Murray

The medicine to fear, these days, is a dose of reality! Because these days the reality is far worse than the disembodiment of the ideal. People today are afraid of the disembodiment of the ideal, because they think the ideal is the reality. A rabbit that does not know it lives in the ground with snakes, is constantly afraid of the sea hawk possibly finding its way to land, to destroy the rabbit's meadowy existence. In the meadow, living in fear of the sea hawk, not knowing the hole in the ground next to its burrow belongs to a snake. I show the rabbit where the snakes are, thus eliminating its hazardous fear. Misplaced fear is hazardous fear. Fear well placed is a skill for survival. — C. JoyBell C.

See?" my mother would say, smiling at me and my sister, Carol, in turn. "We live in the greatest country on earth. See how lucky we are?"
And yet the ash continued swirling down, and the smells of death came through the windows, crept under the door, hung in our carpets and curtains, and screamed of her lie.
Is it possible to tell the truth in a society of lies? Or must you always, of necessity, become a liar?
And if you lie to a liar, is the sin somehow negated or reversed?
These are the kinds of questions I ask myself now: in these dark, watery hours, when night and day are interchangeable. No. Not true. — Lauren Oliver

Art altogether is nothing but a survival skill, we should never lose sight of this fact, it is, time and again, just an attempt
an attempt that seems touching even to our intellect
to cope with this world and its revolting aspects, which, as we know, is invariably possible only by resorting to lies and falsehoods, to hyprocrisy and self-deception, Reger said. These pictures are full of lies and falsehoods and full of hypocrisy and self-deception, there is nothing else in them if we disregard their often inspired artistry. All these pictures, moreover, are an expression of man's absolute helplessness in coping with himself and with what surrounds him all his life. That is what all these pictures express, this helplessness which, on the one hand, embarasses the intellect and, on the other hand, bewilders the same intellect and moves it to tears, Reger said. — Thomas Bernhard

Satan wants you to believe that you don't have a choice in the matter. You can't be happy until things go the way that you want them to. Once you have the perfect marriage, your finances under control, a better job, or a nicer home - then you'll be happy. LIES, LIES, LIES. You will never be happy until you make the decision to do so. — Lindsey Rietzsch

Fearful leaders side-step issues instead of dealing with them, cover up mistakes instead of owning up to mistakes; they skulk back into the shadows and hope that the crisis - whatever it is - will somehow blow over instead of facing their fears. Worse, they resort to lies and deception to cover up the truth. — Lee Ellis

Her words were like tinfoil; they shone and they covered things up. — Helen Cross

We are partners in our own deception. The lies we tell ourselves. The life we have settled for, when we yearn for the life we wish for. We become our own worst enemy as we yearn for the things we don't have and discredit the gifts we have. — Tony Curl

Life, at all times full of pain, is more painful in our time than in the two centuries that preceded it. The attempt to escape from pain drives men to triviality, to self-deception, to the invention of vast collective myths. But these momentary alleviations do but increase the sources of suffering in the long run. Both private and public misfortune can only be mastered by a process in which will and intelligence interact: the part of will is to refuse to shirk the evil or accept an unreal solution, while the part of intelligence is to understand it, to find a cure if it is curable, and, if not, to make it bearable by seeing it in its relations, accepting it as unavoidable, and remembering what lies outside it in other regions, other ages, and the abysses of interstellar space — Bertrand Russell

I believe in my mask
The man I made up is me
I believe in my dance
And my destiny — Sam Shepard

I saw through the lies, deception and the greed of religion at a very young age. I had experiences that I couldn't — Rick Kueber

Deception, you see, lies at the heart of business, politics and war. Even pleasure, wouldn't you say? Everyone practises it, from the President of China to the whores on Lockhart Road. — Michael Wreford

Man seems to be an animal whose capacity for lies is only equalled by his credulity; it does no good to let battalions of cats outof bags, to produce whole harems of naked facts, people eat the same three meals daily deception, and are always ready to turn with fury upon the purveyors of bagless cats and facts undraped. Probably their instinct is wise. Who knows? — John Dos Passos

Life is about means not ends. There is no utopia to be gained, there is no end-state that is static and eternal, once accomplished. This was one of the great lies of communism. Likewise, capitalism offers the great deception that thanks to its machinations everyone will be richer in the future, thus justifying gross inequality and humiliation today. — Carne Ross

Your nature may carry deception and lies, but then it won't stop me from loving you — Alok Jagawat

There's no greater perjury than self-deception. Lying to ourselves puts to death our definitive truth. Confronting the lies we've told ourselves, no matter how small, is a difficult endeavor but nothing is more liberating. To be honest with ourselves is the fastest path to self-acceptance. Being authentic about who we are, actually enriches the relationships around us. The truth sets us free and that's no lie. ~Jason Versey — Jason Versey

Everything about the left is perception, manipulation, and lies. Everything. Everything is 'Wag the Dog.' Everything is a structured deception. — Rush Limbaugh

LOVE: Deception of the flesh and damage to the spirit. Disease of the soul, atrophy of the brain, weakening of the heart, corruption of the senses, poetic lies from which one gets ferociously inebriated two or three times a day in order to consume this precious but stupid life more quickly. And yet I would prefer to die of love. Its the only swindler, after Judas, that can kill with a kiss. — Renzo Novatore

Keep your finger on the pulse of society, take controversies with a grain of salt, lick your finger and then lift it to the wind; always know what is going on, my friend, so this world can never steer you wrong again. — Criss Jami

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

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

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

Sweet words. Gentle deceptive balm. Help, love, to belong together, to come back again - words, sweet words. Nothing but words. How many words existed for this simple, wild, cruel attraction of two bodies! What a rainbow of imagination, lies, sentiment, and self-deception enclosed it! — Erich Maria Remarque

Among other common lies, we have the _silent_ lie
the deception which one conveys by simply keeping still and concealing the truth. Many obstinate truth-mongers indulge in this dissipation, imagining that if they _speak_ no lie, they lie not at all. — Mark Twain

Those who replace love in people's life with bread, are deceitful, and call their deceit "pious". — Alireza Salehi Nejad

The fact is that we have no way of knowing if the person who we think we are is at the core of our being. Are you a decent girl with the potential to someday become an evil monster, or are you an evil monster that thinks it's a decent girl?"
"Wouldn't I know which one I was?"
"Good God, no. The lies we tell other people are nothing to the lies we tell ourselves. — Derek Landy

Harris: Yes. In fact, self-deception might have paid evolutionary dividends in other ways. Robert Trivers argues, for instance, that people who can believe their own lies turn out to be the best liars of all - and an ability to deceive rivals has obvious advantages in the state of nature. Now, clearly many things may have been adaptive for our ancestors - such as tribal warfare, rape, xenophobia - that we now deem unethical and would never want to defend. But I'm wondering if you see any possibility that a social system that maximizes truth-telling could be one that fails to maximize the well-being of all participants. Is it possible that some measure of deception is good for us? — Sam Harris

Falsehood flies, and truth comes limping after it, so that when men come to be undeceived, it is too late; the jest is over, and the tale hath had its effect: like a man, who hath thought of a good repartee when the discourse is changed, or the company parted; or like a physician, who hath found out an infallible medicine, after the patient is dead. — Jonathan Swift

It should be obvious that this pattern of systematic holes and gaps in Iraq's declaration is not the result of accidents, editing oversights or technical mistakes. These are material omissions that - in our view - constitute another material breach. It is up to Iraq to prove that there is some other explanation besides the obvious one, that this declaration is just one more act of deception in a history of lies from a defiant dictator. — John Negroponte

Breakthrough focused gospel leads to lies and deception — Sunday Adelaja

Wisdom is looking at life from God's point of view. You look at life's difficulties and tests as God looks at them. You look at family life and child rearing as God looks at them. You interpret current events as God would interpret them. You see the truth even though all around you are deception and lies. — Charles R. Swindoll

Mindfulness helps us get better at seeing the difference between what's happening and the stories we tell ourselves about what's happening, stories that get in the way of direct experience. Often such stories treat a fleeting state of mind as if it were our entire and permanent self. — Sharon Salzberg

And Jesus began to say to them, "See to it that no one misleads you. Many will come in My name, saying, 'I am He!' and will mislead many."

Here Christ cautions His present and future disciples from being misled, meaning not to be deceived, caused to err from the truth, or lead to form a wrong judgment. It is important for us to note that we can be deceived if we heed deceivers, instead of Christ Jesus. Many claim and will claim to know Him, but will point us to themselves, to traditions, to lies, and anything instead of to Christ! We must be careful. — Billy Witt

The way to happiness is by truth. Seek to be true in all things and you will have a foundation to build your future. — Shannon L. Alder

Someone ought to invent a tool, a kind of plane to shave the lies away from stories and deception away from memories. I'm a collector of shavings. — Sasa Stanisic

What I warn you to remember is that I am a detective. Our relationship with truth is fundamental but cracked, refracting confusingly like fragmented glass. It is the core of our careers, the endgame of every move we make, and we pursue it with strategies painstakingly constructed of lies and concealment and every variation on deception. — Tana French

Throw massive amounts of deception and the father of lies (yes, I'm referring to Satan) into the mix and you now have ignorance bordering on the fine lines of wickedness and evil. It's easy to be lured into something we hear about, but cannot actually see. — K.J. Masters

An Idea is nothing but Information, It won't do us any harm until we accept it as perception of truth in our mind, which in time will potentially evolve and construct major events in history. — Djayawarman Alamprabu

When you become complacent with someone lying, whether it is a close friend, the media, or your government, then you have essentially given them permission to continue to do so and most often at your expense. — Gary Hopkins

In my view, Roman Catholicism is not even a faith, but is decidedly a continuation of the Western Roman Empire, and in it everything, beginning with faith, is subordinated to that idea. The Pope seized the earth, an earthly throne, and took up the sword; ever since then it has all gone like that, except that to the sword they've added lies, slyness, deception, fanaticism, superstition and evil-doing, and played with the people's most sacred, truthful, simple, fiery emotions, exchanging everything, everything for money, for base, earthly power. And isn't that the teaching of the Antichrist? — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

You can lie in any language on earth, and body language is no exception. — Nenia Campbell

The change, she knew, was only in herself; she was relieved of deception, and her mind was free to work on its familiar paths. She recognized for the first time that lies worked damage in two directions. — Rosemary Kirstein

How shall Integrity face Oppression? What shall Honesty do in the face of Deception, Decency in the face of Insult, Self-Defense before Blows? How shall Desert and Accomplishment meet Despising, Detraction, and Lies? What shall Virtue do to meet Brute Force? There are so many answers and so contradictory; and such differences for those on the one hand who meet questions similar to this once a year or once a decade, and those who face them hourly and daily. — W.E.B. Du Bois

How much easier life was once you learned how to lie. I had gotten into trouble by speaking out of turn, arguing and answering back so many times. Not anymore. Now I would do what I wanted, and no one would stop me. — Zoe Marriott

Life presents itself as a continual deception, in small matters as well as in great. If it has promised, it does not keep its word, unless to show how little desirable the desired object was; hence we are deluded now by hope, now by what was hoped for. If it has given, it did so in order to take. The enchantment of distance shows us paradises that vanish like optical illusions, when we have allowed ourselves to be fooled by them. Accordingly, happiness lies always in the future, or else in the past, and the present may be compared to a small dark cloud driven by the wind over the sunny plain; in front of and behind the cloud everything is bright, only it itself always casts a shadow. Consequently, the present is always inadequate, but the future is uncertain, and the past irrecoverable. — Arthur Schopenhauer

It lies in humanity's infinite capacity for self-deception where some perceived (and in this case long-desired) advantage is at stake — Antonia Fraser

When you keep a secret from those closest to you, even with the best of motives, there is a danger that you will create a smaller life within your main life. The first secret will spin off other secrets that also must be kept, complicated webs of evasion that grow into elaborate architectures of repressed truths and subterfuge, until you discover that you must live two narratives at once. Because deception requires both bold lies and lies of omission, it stains the soul, muddies the conscience, blurs the vision, and puts you at risk of headlong descent into greater darkness. — Dean Koontz

How often have I painted a splendid picture of a journey marked by courageous ascents and daring desert crossings when all along all I've really been doing is running? — Craig D. Lounsbrough

Art has no place in modern life. It will continue to exist as long as there is a mania for the romantic and so long as there are people who love beautiful lies and deception ... Every modern cultured man must wage war against art, as against opium ... Photograph and be photographed. — Alexander Rodchenko