Deception Quotes - Page 11

Sometimes terror and pain are not the best levers; deception, when it works, is the most elegant and the least expensive manipulation of all.

Roland had taught him that self-deception was nothing but pride in disguise, an indulgence to be denied.

The instinct for self-deception in human beings makes them try to banish from their minds dangers of which at bottom they are perfectly aware by declaring them non-existent.

Self-deception can be more comforting than self-knowledge. We like to fool ourselves.

That which deceives us and does us harm, also undeceives us and does us good.

Our myths are so many, our vision so dim, our self-deception so deep and our smugness so gross that scarcely any way now remains of reporting the American Century except from behind the billboards.

The biggest awakening is the awakening from the childish deceptions and the invented tales of the religion.

In itself, the practice of deception is not particularly exacting; it is a matter of experience, of professional expertise, it is a facility most of us can acquire.

We never deceive people to benefit them, for knavery is a compound of wickedness and falsehood.

When the time comes I will go joyfully. Whatever may be there, it will be real, without complication, without ridicule, without deception.

Fake it may be, lies and deceptions, but this is the world in which we find ourselves, and here we must make our little lives.

Poor people make a very poor business of it when they try to seem rich.

The only safety is in the middle of total misunderstanding and deception.

Everything is deception: seeking the minimum of illusion, keeping within the ordinary limitations, seeking the maximum. In the first case one cheats the Good, by trying to make it too easy for oneself to get it, and the Evil by imposing all too unfavorable conditions of warfare on it. In the second case one cheats the Good by keeping as aloof from it as possible, and the Evil by hoping to make it powerless through intensifying it to the utmost.

The most effectual way to be deceived is to believe oneself more cunning than one's neighbors.

One of Satan's most frequently used deceptions is the notion that the commandments of God are meant to restrict freedom and limit happiness.

A truth is what it is. A lie, a thought out deception more brutal than a truth could ever be.

No satisfaction based upon self-deception is solid.

If you are often deceived by those around you, you may be sure that you deserve to be deceived; and that instead of railing at the general falseness of mankind, you have first to pronounce judgment on your own jealous tyranny, or on your own weak credulity.

Everything had been stripped of deceptions, that time. And that time I was afraid of everything.

The only gratification that science denies to us is deception.

Life is deceitful because all warfare is based on deception.

The most dire of all of life's grueling deceptions wedge themselves in in our minds between truth and perceptions.

Nobody could paint eyes like El Greco and nobody can paint eyes like Walter Keane.

Magic things are fond of deceptions.