Quotes & Sayings About Phonies

Royal summoned mourners. They came from the village, from the neighboring hills and, wailing like dogs at midnight, laid siege to the house. Old women beat their heads against the walls, moaning men prostrated themselves: it was the art of sorrow, and those who best mimicked grief were much admired. After the funeral everyone went away, satisfied that they'd done a good job. — Truman Capote

Most of these university types are total phonies. They're scared to death somebody's gonna find they don't know something. They all read the same books and they all throw around the same words, and they get off listening to John Coltrane and seeing Pasolini movies. You call that 'revolution'? That does it for me, then. I'm not going to believe in any damned revolution. Love is all I'm going to believe in. — Haruki Murakami

Never, never trust anyone who asks for white wine. It means they're phonies. — Bette Davis

The one that sang, old Janine, was always whispering into the g***** microphone before she sang. She'd say, 'And now we like to geeve you our impression of Vooly Voo Fransay. Eet ees the story of leetle Fransh girl who comes to a beeg ceety, just like New York, and falls een love wees a leetle boy from Brookleen. We hope you like eet.' Then, when she was all done whispering and being cute as hell, she'd sing some dopey song, half in English and half in French, and drive all the phonies in the place mad with joy. — J.D. Salinger

The real strong have no need to prove it to the phonies. — Charles Manson

I was surrounded by phonies ... They were coming in the goddam window. — J.D. Salinger

The small amount of people that control the discourse around painting - I thought that the whole museum world was just a bunch of phonies, and I didn't really want to have anything to do with it. I guess I did installations, in a funny way, because they couldn't be commodified. — Fred Tomaselli

You ought to go to a boys' school sometime. Try it sometime," I said. "It's full of phonies, and all you do is study so that you can learn enough to be smart enough to be able to buy a goddam Cadillac some day, and you have to keep making believe you give a damn if the football team loses, and all you do is talk about girls and liquor and sex all day, and everybody sticks together in these dirty little goddam cliques. The guys that are on the basketball team stick together, the Catholics stick together, the goddam intellectuals stick together, the guys that play bridge stick together. Even the guys that
belong to the goddam Book-of-the-Month Club stick together. — J.D. Salinger

We talked about phonies. We talked about truth. We talked about gangsters; we talked about business. We talked about the nice poor people who went to the electric chair; and we talked about the rich bastards who didn't. We talked about religious people who had perversions. We talked about a lot of things.
We got drunk. — Kurt Vonnegut

It's painful to believe that the would-be 'public servants' you're forced to choose between are all phonies whose only real concern is their own care and feeding and who will lie so outrageously and with such a straight face that you know they've just got to believe you're an idiot. — David Foster Wallace

You may not personally remember Vietnam or Watergate, but it's a good bet you remember "No new taxes" and "Out of the loop" and "No direct knowledge of any impropriety at this time" and "Did not inhale" and "Did not have sex with that Ms. Lewinsky" and etc. etc. It's painful to believe that the would-be "public servants" you're forced to choose between are all phonies whose only real concern is their own care and feeding and who will lie so outrageously and with such a straight face that you know they've just got to believe you're an idiot. So who wouldn't yawn and turn away, trade apathy and cynicism for the hurt of getting treated with contempt? — David Foster Wallace

Pete (Rose) doesn't run with celebrities and he can't stand the phonies. His big buddy in LA ain't Sinatra, it's a funny old groundskeeper. — Sparky Anderson

It's one of those places that are supposed to be very sophisticated and all, and the phonies are coming in the window. — J.D. Salinger

Wouldn't it be great if all career phonies, faux friends or opportunists could be identified quickly in professional networking circles by wearing signs like "Career Dip", "No Loyalty Card" or "Opportunist Knocks"? — Torry Martin

Like most seasoned phonies, I roundly suspect that everyone is as disingenuous as I am. — David Sedaris

I was in the land of fakes and frauds and phonies - I felt like saying "Howdy cousin," to everybody who walked by. — Gary Reilly

She said some people were horizontally oriented, while others were vertical. Horizontally oriented people were concerned exclusively with what others think, with fitting in or impressing their peers. Vertically oriented people were obsessed only with some higher "truth," which they believed in wholeheartedly and wanted to trumpet no matter who was interested. People who are horizontally oriented are phonies and sycophants, while those who are entirely vertically oriented lack all social skill - they're the ones on the street shouting about the apocalypse. Normal people are in the middle, but veer one way or the other. — Adelle Waldman

They're a symbol of the whole town, pretending to fight, love, weep and laugh all the time - and they're phonies, all of them. And I head the list ... their phony hearts were dripping with the milk of human kindness. — Ben Hecht

Writers are such phonies: they sometimes have wise insights but they don't live by them at all. That's what writers are like ... you think they know something, but usually they are just messes. — Anne Sexton

He came to put a harlot above a Pharisee, a penitent robber above a High Priest, and a prodigal son above his exemplary brother. To all the phonies and fakers who would say that they could not join the Church because His Church was not holy enough, He would ask, 'How holy must the Church be before you will enter into it?' If the Church were as holy as they wanted it to be, they would never be allowed into it! In every other religion under the sun, in every Eastern religion from Buddhism to Confucianism, there must always be some purification before one can commune with God. But Our Blessed Lord brought a religion where the admission of sin is the condition of coming to Him. 'Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are ill. — Fulton J. Sheen

It shouldn't come as any surprise that those who choose acting as a profession are phonies who live in a fantasy world. What is surprising is how many of them are blissfully unaware of it. — Julie Burchill

I failed to understand what was so enviable about having a position that a pack of phonies sucked up to. Dishwashing suited me because nice people were nice to me and assholes were assholes to me, yet no one ever sucked up to me. — Pete Jordan

See, Biff, everybody around me is so false that I'm constantly lowering my ideals ... — Arthur Miller

I do note that photography, a despised medium to work in, is full of empty phonies and worthless commercial people. That presents quite a challenge to the man who can take delight in being in a very difficult, disdained medium. — Walker Evans

Don't underestimate the value people place on authenticity. Politicians listen to the focus groups and say the things they think people want to hear. But after 30 years of reading consumers, I know that they can smell phonies. — Rochelle B Lazarus

A lot of people think the blues is depressing but that's not the blues I'm singing. When I'm singing blues, I singing life. People can't stand to listen to the blues, they've got to be phonies. — Etta James

Live how you live, feel how you feel and fuck all the phonies in your way. — Christopher Krovatin

In a town full of phonies, I'm not afraid to be me. — Kyle Richards

When he greeted them on Day 16, he said, "Thanks so much, such great food for us." This time he gave a false, fake laugh. Phony. I thought of my mother . Her disdain for phonies was even greater than her disdain for the lazy. — Shannon Kirk

Watch for phonies, keep your enemies close nigga watch your homies — Tupac Shakur

Our offices must always be headed by the kind of men who command respect. Not phonies, zeros or bastards. — David Ogilvy

It's full of phonies and all you do is study so that you can learn enough to be smart enough to be able to buy a golden Cadillac ... — J.D. Salinger

With good morality first candidates you'll get bad candor, bad ethics, bad loyalty and bad morality - lastly bad odor will surface to save the day if you maintain good optimism like I do. — Brian Spellman

From Dickens's cockneys to Salinger's phonies, from Kerouac's beatniks to Cheech and Chong's freaks, and on to hip hop's homies, dialect has always been used as a way for generations to distinguish themselves. — Christopher Moore

Gerald's look assured her that he and the others would be as near angels as children could be without ceasing to be human. — E. Nesbit

One of our great problems today is that we have gotten caught up in our culture-wide quest for authenticity. We want our jeans authentic (pre-ripped at the factory), we want our apples authentic (grown locally instead of somewhere else), we want our music authentic (underground bands nobody ever heard of), we want our lettuce authentic (organically manured), we want our literature authentic (full of angst), we want our movies authentic (subtitles), and we want our coffee tables authentic (purchased from a genuine peasant while we were on some eco-tour). In short, we are a bunch of phonies. We are superficial all the way down. — Douglas Wilson

When the phonies are expelled from their leadership roles and the Republican Party backs a moderate gubernatorial candidate acceptable to the rank and file with proper financing and the intestinal fortitude to fight the good fight, the rank and file will rejoin the fold. — Carl Paladino

Lawyers are alright, I guess - but it doesn't appeal to me", I said. "I mean they're alright if they go around saving innocent guys' lives all the time, and like that, but you don't do that kind of stuff if you're a lawyer. All you do is make a lot of dough and play golf and play bridge and buy cars and drink Martinis and look like a hot-shot. And besides, even if you did go around saving guys' lives and all, how would you know if you did it because you really wanted to save guys' lives, or because you did it because what you really wanted to do was be a terrific lawyer, with everybody slapping you on the back and congratulating you in court when the goddam trial was over, the reporters and everybody, the way it is in the dirty movies? How would you know you weren't being a phony? The trouble is you wouldn't. — J.D. Salinger

If you sat around there long enough and heard all the phonies applauding and all, you got to hate everybody in the world, I swear you did. — J.D. Salinger

You shall find dear, that the world is full of two-faced people and phonies.'.. And Uruvi was to discover a cruelly superficial world, which she had failed to recognize. — Kavita Kane

We are now surrounded, outmanned, and outgunned by a generation of phonies, grasping for acceptance through appearance and behavior that have no productive impact on the world. — Greg Gutfeld

We lie and we are lied to, and the best liars - the ones who don't even see it as lying - get the business cards and the corner offices and the fancy clothes some other liar tricked them into thinking they needed. At least it used to bother people that the liars and
frauds and phonies rose to the top, the citizens expressed concern that shit floated. Today we put the shit on magazine covers, laud its buoyancy, and anxiously wait to buy the shit's best-selling business book about how you can float your shit, too. — Shalom Auslander

They were liberating Harrisonville, showing the hypocrites and phonies and $$$-squirrelers and chokeragged Yesmen some puffed-up balls. They were widening the mental horizons of a town more narrow-minded than its streets; they were missionaries laboring amon their bloodkin: montheytheistic theocentric cousins and uncles who swore allegiance to Uncle Sam, Jim Crow, Oral Roberts, and Dale Carnegie; they were waging their impudent revolution against people they'd cowedly called "sir" all their teenage lives. — Joe Eszterhas

Don't support the phonies, SUPPORT THE REAL — Tupac Shakur