Quotes & Sayings About Phony

I think we're in an age starved for genuine experiences, instead of cathartic phony experiences through the media, structured, engineered experiences. And those are the fast food, the masturbation of experience. They don't really exhaust any aspect of ourselves; they don't make us any stronger. — Chuck Palahniuk

Christianity happens when men and women accept with unwavering trust that their sins have been not only forgiven, but forgotten, washed away in the blood of the Lamb. Thus, my friend archbishop Joe Reia says, A sad Christian is a phony Christian, and a guilty Christian is no Christian at all. — Brennan Manning

Phony never led anyone to Jesus. — Mark Hall

Making music clips, I have a responsibility to depict the artist in a way that suits them, and feels comfortable with how they want to present their music. From there I usually try to tell a story visually that complements the music, that lets the music be the hero element of the project. I just try to do something that feels sincere and creative and a little bit home-brewed so it doesn't feel too plastic or phony. — Adria Petty

God is never impressed with the phony. He has no time or patience for the false; God deals only with truth. He says that to trust His Word as a plain statement of truth, ignoring all the mocking taunts of those who think they know better, will not be an easy path but it will be an absolutely sure one. That is what Hebrews 11 says to us. — Ray C. Stedman

A company of wolves, is better than a company of wolves in sheep's clothing. — Anthony Liccione

In fact the "mask" theme has come up several times in my background reading. Richard Sennett, for example, in "The Corrosion of Character: The Personal Consequences of Work in the New Capitalism", and Robert Jackall, in "Moral Mazes: The World of Corporate managers", refer repeatedly to the "masks" that corporate functionaries are required to wear, like actors in an ancient Greek drama. According to Jackall, corporate managers stress the need to exercise iron self-control and to mask all emotion and intention behind bland, smiling, and agreeable public faces.
Kimberly seems to have perfected the requisite phoniness and even as I dislike her, my whole aim is to be welcomed into the same corporate culture that she seems to have mastered, meaning that I need to "get in the face" of my revulsion and overcome it. But until I reach that transcendent point, I seem to be stuck in an emotional space left over from my midteen years: I hate you; please love me. — Barbara Ehrenreich

Cuz phony faggots I froze, it's a fact, I flip fast on foes with fabulous fantastic flows. — Big L

I think [audiences are] more aware now of the contradictions in mainstream culture, the phony piety that permeates society, the inhumane hypocrisy. — Paul Krassner

Months after my first real breakup, I was experiencing the ego thrash that comes with watching an old boyfriend move on. I was lucky she wasn't a beauty queen. Dissecting her physical flaws was the aspirin that would not heal my wounds, but temporarily eased my pain. For the first time in my life, I managed to behave like a true southern belle. I lifted my lips into a bright smile and warmly greeted my enemy as if she were my new best friend.
With all the phony verbal sugar I could muster I said, "Hi! We haven't met before. My name's Maggie. — Maggie Young

If you don't know how to hold a board, you're going to look phony. That's was the biggest pressure for me was to have that respect and to look up to that. — John Robinson

New Rule: Conspiracy theorists who are claiming that we didn't really kill Bin Laden must be reminded that they didn't think he did the crime in the first place. Come on, nutjobs, keep your bullshit straight: The towers were brought down in a controlled demolition by George W. Bush to distract attention from Hawaii, where CIA operatives were planting phony birth records so that a Kenyan named Barack Obama could someday rise to power and pretend to take out the guy we pretended took out the Towers. And I know that's true because I just got it in an e-mail from Trump. — Bill Maher

Just once I'd like to meet a fella who isn't a phony. Somebody who doesn't wanna buy me a fur so he can show me off to his boys. — Libba Bray

See the man on the TV with a phony smile. Bring you up, bring you down, he can turn your head around. — Van Morrison

Joe: You don't want me, Sugar. I'm a liar and a phony. A saxophone player. One of those no-goodniks you keep running away from. Sugar: I know, every time. Joe: Sugar, do yourself a favor. Go back to where the millionaires are, the sweet end of the lollipop, not the cole slaw in the face, the old socks and the squeezed-out tube of toothpaste. Sugar: That's right. Pour it on. Talk me out of it. (She grabs him to kiss him.) — Marilyn Monroe

My grandmothers are Irish-American and German-American; my grandfather is from the Caribbean. My father is African-American. My family looked funny. I just started naturally imitating whoever I was talking to. I didn't want to be a phony, but I felt very authentic in the moment. — Sarah Jones

You just have to do the thing that you feel is true to your vision, and then the audience will make the decision. But as soon as you feel like you're creating a product to just cater to what you think they want, it never works. It always feels phony. And the audience can tell immediately. — Rob Zombie

I'm an entertainer; I try to give the public what it wants while I'm on the screen, and I'm completely sincere about it. If I don't happen to be a laughing boy off the screen, that doesn't make me a hypocrite or a phony. — Johnny Carson

I know a 'crime against nature' when I see one. It is usually a sign of crimes against nature that we cannot bear to see them at all, that we recoil and hide our eyes, and no one has ever cringed at the sight of a soybean factory. I also know phony arguments when I hear them
unbridled appetite passing itself off as altruism, and human arrogance in the guise of solemn 'duty.' We must, as C.S. Lewis advises, 'reject with detestation that covert propoganda for cruelty which tries to drive mercy out of the world by calling it names such as 'Humanitarianism' and 'Sentimentality. — Matthew Scully

The organization of American society is an interlocking system of semi-monopolies notoriously venal, an electorate notoriously unenlightened, misled by mass media notoriously phony. — Paul Goodman

A placebo is a phony cure that works. This is very hard for the medical profession to get their teeth around because they hate placebos, but scientifically, placebos work in about 30% of cases that are psychogenic diseases. — Charles Jencks

When you accept yourself completely you do not have to maintain a phony front, drive yourself to 'achieve' or feel insecure if people tune-in to you and what you are doing. — Ken Keyes Jr.

With George Clooney, the distinctive quality is a unique kind of American phoniness - charming because it's aware of itself as phony. It's as old as old Huck Finn, but, in our age, it has migrated from the fringes to the center. — Rich Cohen

Strip away the phony tinsel of Hollywood and you'll find the real tinsel underneath. — Oscar Levant

It's way too easy to see the real face of a person. They're amiable and full of pretense when they want something from you, but the minute you don't give in, back away or put yourself first (like they do) is the minute they show you who they really are. — Donna Lynn Hope

Nothing had worked out the way it should have. All of the hopes had turned out to be phony, as false as those Audioanimatronic animals at Disney World, just a bunch of clockwork, a cheat, a false dawn, a false pregnancy, a - — Stephen King

I am so spoiled. I cannot watch a show where it gets interrupted for ads. I have to TiVo it and skip through the ads, because the culture of advertising is so false and phony that I just ... ugh, you know? — Alan Ball

Bradford Dillman sounded like a distinguished, phony theatrical name, so I kept it. — Bradford Dillman

We used to be a serious country. When we got attacked at Pearl Harbor, we took on Imperial Japan, Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany. We beat all three in less than four years. We're about to enter the seventh year of this phony war against ... [terrorist groups], and we're losing. — Newt Gingrich

The moment you sense someone is making something because they think people are gonna buy it or like it, it's just so phony! The public has a nose for phony like nobody else. — Zooey Deschanel

The America of Obama's dreams is not the one of self-reliance and entrepreneurship to which he paid phony lip service at the beginning of his speech. It is an America in which the government, rather than the private sector, creates wealth and leads ignorant, helpless people by the nose from cradle to grave, from preschool to the academy, with the caveat that if they succeed too much, they will make themselves enemies of the state and targets for punitive action. Obama's new American dreams is an American nightmare. — David Limbaugh

Will you let me go for Christ's sake? Will you take that phony dream and burn it before something happens? — Arthur Miller

Managers who don't lead are quite discouraging, but leaders who don't manage don't know what's going on. It's a phony separation that people are making between the two. — Henry Mintzberg

Don't you just hate a phony-looking stiff? - Aunt Edna — Janet Evanovich

Flaky devotionalism, bowing and scraping and sucking up to the teacher is very phony. It is counterproductive to enlightenment and spiritual development. What is necessary is mutual respect. — Frederick Lenz

Kids can spot a phony a mile away. — Fred Rogers

That radicalism (of the '70s) was phony, really, because it was out of guilt. I'd always felt guilty that I made money, so I had to give it away or lose it. I don't mean I was a hypocrite. When I believe, I believe right down to the roots. — John Lennon

The bigger the population gets, the more serious the problems become ... We have to address the population issue. The United Nations, with the U.S. supporting it, took the position in Cairo in 1994 that every country was responsible for stabilizing its own population. It can be done. But in this country, it's phony to say 'I'm for the environment but not for limiting immigration.' — Gaylord Nelson

Teachers at all levels encourage the idea that you have to talk about things in order to understand them, because they wouldn't have jobs, otherwise. But it's phony, you know. — Denise Levertov

I had a nightmare about the Averys' sweet-tempered German shepherd, Ina. In the dream, as I was sitting on the floor in the Averys' living room, the dog walked up to me and began to insult me. She said I was a frivolous, cynical, attention-seeking "fag" whose entire life had been phony. I answered her frivolously and cynically and chucked her under the chin. She grinned at me with malice, as if to make clear that she understood me to the core. Then she sank her teeth into my arm. As I fell over backward, she went for my throat. — Jonathan Franzen

As she reached for the plates, she wondered if her life could get any weirder. Her life savings had been handed over to a band of South American guerrillas, she had a phony engagement to a famous football player, she was homeless and jobless, and she was making breakfast for Mad Jack Patriot. — Susan Elizabeth Phillips

Our current drug crisis is a tragedy born of a phony system of classification. For reasons that are little more than accidents of history, we have divided a group of nonfood substances into two categories: items purchasable for supposed pleasure (such as alcohol), and illicit drugs. — Stephen Jay Gould

The studio rented a house for my wife in Los Angeles under a phony name to keep reporters away. Whenever I wanted to visit her and my children, I would have to sneak in the back door after dark. — Max Von Sydow

School is about learning to wait your turn, however long it takes to come, if ever. And how to submit with a show of enthusiasm to the judgment of strangers, even if they are wrong, even if your enthusiasm is phony. — John Taylor Gatto

You just don't invade another country on phony pretext in order to assert your interests! — John F. Kerry

Nobody could have possibly known that the FBI had sent a phony letter to Eldridge Cleaver in Algiers, 'signed' by the Panther 21, criticizing Huey Newton's leadership... no one could have known that the FBI's cointelpro was attempting to destroy the Black Panther Party in particular, and the Black Liberation movement in general, using divide-and-conquer tactics. — Assata Shakur

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

I'm the girl who is lost in space, the girl who is disappearing always, forever fading away and receding farther and farther into the background. Just like the Cheshire cat, someday I will suddenly leave, but the artificial warmth of my smile, that phony, clownish curve, the kind you see on miserably sad people and villains in Disney movies, will remain behind as an ironic remnant. I am the girl you see in the photograph from some party someplace or some picnic in the park, the one who is in fact soon to be gone. When you look at the picture again, I want to assure you, I will no longer be there. I will be erased from history, like a traitor in the Soviet Union. Because with every day that goes by, I feel myself becoming more and more invisible ... — Elizabeth Wurtzel

Buechner put it this way: The Gospel is bad news before it is good news. It is the news that man is a sinner . . . that when he looks in the mirror all in a lather what he sees is at least eight parts chicken, phony, slob. That is the tragedy. But it is also the news that he is loved anyway, cherished, forgiven, bleeding to be sure, but also bled for. — Lois Rabey

Commercials were too phony for me. I just didn't like selling products I didn't believe in. — River Phoenix

Nowadays, the game is all bugged out,
Phony, like back when Hammer tried to come thugged out. — Daniel Dumile

As a young man ... you don't know anything about yourself. And add on to that, you're on the cover of magazines. People are interviewing you about what you think. You feel like a real phony. — Ethan Hawke

According to a new report, more than 700 fake Obamacare websites have been created. Security experts say it's simple to identify the phony sites because they are easy to log on to. — Jay Leno

As I see it, a person's culture represents his appraisal of the things that make up his life. And a fellow becomes cultured, I believe, by selecting that which is fine and beautiful in life and throwing aside that which is mediocre or phony. Sort of a series of free, very personal choices, you might say. If this is true, then I think it follows that 'freedom' is the most precious word to culture. Freedom to believe what you choose and read, think and say and be with what you choose. In America, we are guaranteed these freedoms. It is the constitutional privilege of every American to become cultured or to grow up like Donald Duck. I believe that this spiritual and intellectual freedom, which we Americans enjoy, is our greatest cultural blessing. Therefore, it seems to me, that the first duty of culture is to defend freedom and resist all tyranny. — Walt Disney Company

I mention my age because I find people in this country - women, not men, of course - women are so troubled by their age. There's a culture of youth, and it's a phony culture. — Teresa Heinz

Most writers' view of the New West is either phony - obsessed with the same tired mythology - or it's obsessed with anti-mythology, ... There's not a lot of realistic, observant writing about the West right now. — Walter Kirn

What simple and
ordinary lives we live,
underneath the shadows
of projection screen
artists — Phil Volatile

I was really into films when I was younger, but I feel like a bit of a phony sometimes - I started acting because I didn't know what else to do. I filled in all these university application forms and honestly didn't want to do any of the courses. — Aidan Turner

Are there memories left that are safe from the clutches of phony anniversaries? — Pope Paul VI

But she had loved her philosopher so strongly that she had made him believe that her body was aroused and ecstatic. Ibn Rushd had been fooled. Men were easily deceived in such matters because they wanted to believe they had the power to arouse. She wanted to make him believe he pleased her. But the truth was that she could give physical pleasure to a man but not receive it, she could only imagine what such pleasure might be like, she could watch and learn, and offer up to her lover the outward signs of it, while trying to fool herself, as well as him, that yes, she was being pleasured too, which made her an actress, a phony, and a self-deceiving fool. — Salman Rushdie

He was incredibly phony, a complete poseur... He pretended to be interested in technology, but he wasn't. He was a marketing guy, and that is what marketing guys are: paid poseurs. — Walter Isaacson

For fantasy is true, of course. It isn't factual, but it is true. Children know that. Adults know it too, and that is precisely why many of them are afraid of fantasy. They know that its truth challenges, even threatens, all that is false, all that is phony, unnecessary, and trivial in the life they have let themselves be forced into living. They are afraid of dragons, because they are afraid of freedom. — Ursula K. Le Guin

I believe it was Today show fourth-hour host Kathie Lee Gifford who said, 'If drag queens love you, you'll have the longest career in the world. They know phony and they know real.' — Kathie Lee Gifford

He was part of a ruined generation of young men coddled by their parents -by their mothers especially- raised on unearned self-esteem, in a bubble of overaffection, in a sad incubator of phony achievement. — Jess Walter

Catfish Hunter was a man among men. He was a genuine person. There was nothing phony about him. I learned a lot from him, both on and off the baseball field. — Vida Blue

I live in my own way, I don't consider you. I don't consider anybody at all - because if you start considering others you can't live your life authentically. Consider and you will become phony. — Osho

I let people see the cracks in my life. We can't be phony. We've got to keep it real. — Charles R. Swindoll

Being with her was like being backstage during an amateurish, ridiculous play. — Nathanael West

Man prides himself on being the only animal who can modify his nature, yet when he chooses to do so he is called a phony. — Anton Szandor LaVey

Behind the phony tinsel of Hollywood lies the real tinsel. — Oscar Levant

I'm not a phony-friendly guy and I'm usually very quiet and not a big laugher, so some people might take that for rudeness and being mean. If anyone ever got that impression, I apologize. I love all my fans and really appreciate all their support! — Jesse McCartney

It's obsequious little nicety-nice girls like me who allow assholes to run the world: Miss Harlot O'Harlots, billionaire phony tree huggers, hypocrite drug-snorting, weed-puffing peace activists who fund the mass-murdering drug cartels and perpetuate crushing poverty in dirt-poor banana republics. It's my petty fear of personal rejection that allows so many true evils to exist. My cowardice enables atrocities. — Chuck Palahniuk

I see many people trying to write well about the wilderness, and essentially failing. To me there are basically two aspects of a failed outdoor story. One is the phony epiphany on the mountain top. — Tim Cahill

The hell with "love" anyway, and with every other phony, time-wasting, half-assed emotion in the world. — Richard Yates

Coming from money in a place like this gives you automatic popularity and acceptance if you care about those kinds of things, but I don't.
It's phony.
Nothing genuine can ever be cultivated under those circumstances, and I'm fine with this. — Jason Myers

Look, you're small-town. I've had over 50 jobs, maybe a hundred. I've never stayed anywhere long. What I am trying to say is, there is a certain game played in offices all over America. The people are bored, they don't know what to do, so they play the office-romance game. Most of the time it means nothing but the passing of time. Sometimes they do manage to work off a screw or two on the side. But even then, it is just an offhand pasttime, like bowling or t.v. or a New Year's Eve party. You've got to understand that it doesn't mean anything and then you won't get hurt. Do you understand what I mean?"
I think that Mr. Partisan is sincere."
You're going to get stuck with that pin, babe, don't forget what I told you. Watch those slicks. They are as phony as a lead dime. — Charles Bukowski

Donald Trump is a phony, a fraud.His promises are as worthless as a degree from Trump University. — Mitt Romney

As a piece of writing, The Elementary Particles feels like a bad, self-conscious pastiche of Camus, Foucault and Bret Easton Ellis. And as a philosophical tract, it evinces a fiercely nihilistic, anti-humanistic vision built upon gross generalizations and ridiculously phony logic. It is a deeply repugnant read. — Michiko Kakutani

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

that imposter or phony feeling at work or school rarely has anything to do with our abilities, but has more to do with that fearful voice inside of us that scolds and asks, "Who do you think you are? — Brene Brown

People striving for approval from others become phony. — Ichiro Suzuki

He discusses his service in Iraq, the wounds he suffered there, and he says to me in this ad, 'Until you have the guts to call me a 'phony soldier' to my face, stop telling lies about my service.' You know, this is such a blatant use of a valiant combat veteran, lying to him about what I said, then strapping those lies to his belt, sending him out via the media in a TV ad to walk into as many people as he can walk into. — Rush Limbaugh

I am not surprised that the President of the United States called this a phony scandal. I'm not surprised that Secretary Clinton asked, "What difference does it make?" I'm not even surprised that Jay Carney said that Benghazi happened 'a long time ago.' I'm just surprised at how many people bought it. — Trey Gowdy

Honestly, you got to take care of the people that take care of you. I know that sounds like cliche, or borderline phony, but that's the case. The reason I've had the fans that I have is because I've been consistent over the years and kept coming back and doing the same runs. I'm never going to stop doing the cities I've gone through. I'm only going to add. — Gabriel Iglesias

Wait: His boyfriend? He was gay? The focus on the lens sharpened, and I could see it clearly now. Of course he was gay. Everyone could see that, except the chubby little lonely heart sitting at seven o'clock, drawing sparkly rainbows on the page with her glitter crayons. I was still beating myself up when the round robin arrived to me, and I sputtered along trying to assemble some phony epiphany with strong verbs, but tears dripped down my face.
The room fell into silence as people waited for me to explain. But what could I possibly say? That I had just discovered my future husband was gay? That I was going to live the rest of my life surrounded by nothing but empty lasagna pans and an overloved cat destined to die before me?
"I'm sorry," I finally said. "I was just reminded of something very painful." And I guess that wasn't a lie. — Sarah Hepola

Instead of learned young people we have donkeys with University degrees. Instead of future leaders we have mollusks with expensive blue jeans and phony revolutionaries with ski masks. And do you know what? Maybe this is another reason why our Moslem invaders have such an easy game. — Oriana Fallaci

On the last day, God will not acquit us because our good works were good enough, but he will look for evidence that our good confession was not phony. It's in this sense that we must be holy. — Kevin DeYoung

I'm me. I can't put on airs. I'm not a phony. I know the way I am hurts me more times than it helps. But somehow it's all tied up with my integrity, and my integrity is the last thing I'm going to let you take from me. — Tony Dorsett

Said I'll make it big when, everybody know me
Well, I made it big and, everybody phony — Mac Miller

The battle for freedom and liberty really never is over, and there are really low points in it, but I'm not giving up, and I'm not gonna engage in phony pep talks, either. — Rush Limbaugh

Listen to me," he said, and to her dismay he stepped closer. "When I first met you," he said, "I had no idea you were one of us. How could I? But I knew that you were different than that phony friend of yours. Not just another pretty girl, but somebody special. — L.J.Smith

I have been able to sniff out a phony. — Jennifer Coolidge

Unlike so many Dylan-writer-wannabes and phony 'encyclopedia' compilers, Sean Wilentz makes me feel he was in the room when he chronicles events that I participated in. Finally a breath of fresh words founded in hardcore, intelligent research. — Al Kooper

The only thing worse than a coach or CEO who doesn't care about his people is one who pretends to care. People can spot a phony every time. — Jimmy Johnson

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

You might be scared to start. That's natural. There's this very real thing that runs rampant in educated people. It's called "impostor syndrome." The clinical definition is a "psychological phenomenon in which people are unable to internalize their accomplishments." It means that you feel like a phony, like you're just winging it, that you really don't have any idea what you're doing. — Austin Kleon

As we grow in disciplined, self-sacrificing love, so we will grow in intercessory prayer. Superficially fervent prayers devoid of such love are finally phony, hollow, shallow.5 — Alexander Strauch

I didn't have to fit into a mold. You make the mold. People can smell a rat. If you're doing thing for marketing and for a record label, you're going to set yourself up to be called a phony. As long as it's true to you, you do it. — Anthony Evans

Indigos disrespect and dislike anyone who's disingenuous. Indigos can feel phoniness in other people, and they won't be phony themselves. Indigos would rather be punished than say something contrary to their feelings. You — Doreen Virtue

She probably knew what a phony slob he was. — Anonymous