Phony People Quotes & Sayings

Reality TV now doesn't feel reality TV when it started. The line between reality and fiction is blurred. So many of these people are phony or shallow, in their own right. If you've ever watched any of The Real Housewives, or those types of shows, they're all performing. Even though they're real people, they're performing. — Portia De Rossi

It considers not only how we relate to others, but how we relate to our ideas of others so that a completely phony, non-human replica of a dead wife can inspire the same feelings that the wife herself once did. That is a peculiarity of humans: We feel the same emotions for our ideas as we do for the real world, which is why we can cry while reading a book, or fall in love with movie stars. Our idea of humanity bewitches us, while humanity itself stays safely sealed away into its billions of separate containers, or people. — Roger Ebert

Old lady judges watch people in pairs
Limited in sex, they dare
To push fake morals, insult and stare
While money doesn't talk, it swears
Obscenity, who really cares
Propaganda, all is phony. — Bob Dylan

I didn't come to Hollywood. Hollywood came to me. A lot of people wish they could say the things I say. Everyone out here is so phony, it's sickening. — Mr. T

When someone disagrees with me, I do not have to immediately start revising what I just said. People don't want me to always agree with them. They can sense this is phony. They can sense I am trying to control them: I am agreeing with them to make them like me. They feel; "I don't want to exist to like you. I DON'T exist to like you." — Hugh Prather

The true definition of a phony is a high flyer with low mileage; a person who offers a worldview from the comforts of his/her living room. — Johnnie Dent Jr.

People respect you because they feel you've survived hard times and endured, and although you've become famous, you haven't become phony. — Marilyn Monroe

A lot of what people did and said when they "predicted" things, Morey now realized, was phony: pretending to know things rather than actually knowing things. There were a great many interesting questions in the world to which the only honest answer was, "It's impossible to know for sure". — Michael Lewis

The abuse of power manifests with phony spiritual teachers and phony gurus who tell you how to run your life and what to wear and what to eat, all that sort of stuff. They abuse. People don't realize that, listen to them and ruin their lives. — Frederick Lenz

I used to wonder about the fake pictures that came in frames you buy at the store - ladies with smooth brown hair and show-me smiles, grapefruit-headed babies on their sibling's knees - people who in real life probably were strangers brought together by a talent scout to be a phony family.

Maybe it's not so different from real photos, after all. — Jodi Picoult

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.

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

I don't mind nothing happening in a book, but nothing happening in a phony way
characters saying things people never say, doing jobs that don't fit, the whole works
is simply asking too much of a reader. Something happening in a phony way must beat nothing happening in a phony way every time, right? I mean, you could prove that, mathematically, in an equation, and you can't often apply science to literature. — Nick Hornby

I'm not a great one for chatting people up, because it's phony. I don't want people to feel at ease. You want a bit of edge. There are quite long, agonized silences. I love it. Something strange might happen. I mean, taking photographs is a very nasty thing to do. It's very cruel. — Antony Armstrong-Jones

Wikipedia was offline after an overheating problem at one of its data centers. It was pretty bad. For a while there, people had nowhere to go for phony, inaccurate information. — Jay Leno

When you're way too real, fake people be like: You're a trip. I want somebody with real game (lies). — T.F. Hodge

The bus here because they lost Rosa Parks's bus."

"Who lost Rosa Parks's bus?"

"White people. Who the fuck else? Supposedly, every February when schoolkids visit the Rosa Parks Museum, or wherever the fuck the bus is at, the bus they tell the kids is the birthplace of the civil rights movement is a phony. Just some old Birmingham city bus they found in some junkyard. That's what my sister says, anyway."

"I don't know."

Cuz took two deep swallows of gin. "What you mean, 'You don't know'? You think that after Rosa Parks bitch-slapped white America, some white rednecks going to go out of their way to save the original bus? That'd be like the Celtics hanging Magic Johnson's jersey in the rafters of the Boston Garden. No fucking way. — Paul Beatty

I see ... the way you're always searching. How much you hate anything fake or phony. How you're older than your years, but still ... playful, like a little girl. How you're always looking into people, or wondering what they see when they look back at you. Your eyes. It's all in the eyes. — Claudia Gray

Phony psychics like Uri Geller have had particular success in bamboozling scientists with ordinary stage magic, because only scientists are arrogant enough to think that they always observe with rigorous and objective scrutiny, and therefore could never be so fooled while ordinary mortals know perfectly well that good performers can always find a way to trick people. — Stephen Jay Gould

Flexibility. Oh, that's pretty clearly saying that what Donald Trump said to The New York Times is very different than what he's saying to the American people. He is not the real deal. He is a phony. — Mitt Romney

I am most often irritated by those who attack the bishop but somehow fall for the securities analyst
those who exercise their skepticism against religion but not against economists, social scientists, and phony statisticians. Using the confirmation bias, these people will tell you that religion was horrible for mankind by counting deaths from the Inquisition and various religious wars. But they will not show you how many people were killed by nationalism, social science, and political theory under Stalin or during the Vietnam War. Even priests don't go to bishops when they feel ill: their first stop is the doctor's. But we stop by the offices of many pseudoscientists and "experts" without alternative. We no longer believe in papal infallibility; we seem to believe in the infallibility of the Nobel, though ... — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Mostly you don't want to make people feel bad because they carry that with them for the rest of their lives. I've found that. I hurt people on Celebrity Fit Club by being too honest. People loved it, but I was serious. I just hate phony baloneys. I can't do it anymore. I told them no. My tongue is too sharp. It was brutal. — Jackee Harry

The most peaceful thing in the world is plowing a field. Chances are you'll do your best thinking that way. And that's why I've always thought and said, farmers are the smartest people in the world, they don't go for high hats and they can spot a phony a mile off. — Harry Truman

What's so phony nowadays is all this familiarity. Pretending there isn't any difference between people - well, like you were saying about minorities, this morning. If you and I are no different, what do we have to give each other? How can we ever be friends? — Christopher Isherwood

I grew up when people seemed actually to be hurting themselves for their art. Of course, some of it was phony. — Barry Hannah

With all of the hysteria, all of the fear, all of the phony science, could it be that man-made global warming is the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people? It sure sounds like it. — James Inhofe

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How empty are the insincere words of people who, so easily, speak forth "love," "family" and "friendship" without meaning what they say even if their intentions are good albeit mere flattery. — Donna Lynn Hope

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It's a phony issue. To pretend the death penalty is going to end crime in the United States is to fool people, to promote public ignorance. — Rudy Giuliani

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