Adults find pleasure in deceiving a child. They consider it necessary, but they also enjoy it. The children very quickly figure it out and then practice deception themselves
– Elias Canetti
We are inclined to believe those whom we do not know because they have never deceived us.
– Samuel Johnson
We are never deceived; we deceive ourselves.
– Goethe
Whoever, in middle age, attempts to realize the wishes and hopes of his early youth, invariably deceives himself. Each ten years of a man’s life has its own fortunes, its own hopes, its own desires.
– Goethe
Oh, the tangled webs we weave When we practice to deceive.
– Sir Walter Scott
The woman whose behavior indicates that she will make a scene if she is told the truth, asks to be deceived
– Elizabeth Jenkins
Nothing is so difficult as not deceiving oneself.
– Ludwig Wittgenstein
For I have sworn thee fair, and thought thee bright, who art as black as hell, as dark as night.
– William Shakespeare
Clouds that thunder do not always rain.
– Armenian Proverb
It is twice the pleasure to deceive the deceiver.
– Author: Jean De La Fontaine
The people of the world having once been deceived, suspect deceit in truth itself.
– Hitoadesa
You can fool all the people some of the time and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time.
–Abraham Lincoln
I have always considered it as treason against the great republic of human nature, to make any man’s virtues the means of deceiving him.
– Samuel Johnson
While all deception requires secrecy, all secrecy is not meant to deceive.
– Sissela Bok
Art is the most beautiful deception of all. And although people try to incorporate the everyday events of life in it, we must hope that it will remain a deception lest it become a utilitarian thing, sad as a factory.
– Claude Debussy
People come to music to seek oblivion: is that not also a form of deception?
– Claude Debussy
Now I believe I can hear the philosophers protesting that it can only be misery to live in folly, illusion, deception and ignorance, but it isn’t -it’s human.
– Desiderius Erasmus
Politicians are masters of the art of deception.
– Martin L. Gross
Certainly, it seems true enough that there’s a good deal of irony in the world… I mean, if you live in a world full of politicians and advertising, there’s obviously a lot of deception.
– Kenneth Koch
Men still have to be governed by deception.
– George C. Lichtenberg
All war is deception.
– Sun Tzu
The one charm about marriage is that it makes a life of deception absolutely necessary for both parties.
– Oscar Wilde
A tyrant must put on the appearance of uncommon devotion to religion. Subjects are less apprehensive of illegal treatment from a ruler whom they consider god-fearing and pious.
– Aristotle
Perhaps the most obvious political effect of controlled news is the advantage it gives powerful people in getting their issues on the political agenda and defining those issues in ways likely to influence their resolution.
– W. Lance Bennett
The first sign of corruption in a society that is still alive is that the end justifies the means.
– Georges Bernanos
Justice in the hands of the powerful is merely a governing system like any other. Why call it justice? Let us rather call it injustice, but of a sly effective order, based entirely on cruel knowledge of the resistance of the weak, their capacity for pain, humiliation and misery.
– Georges Bernanos
An election is nothing more than the advanced auction of stolen goods.
– Ambrose Bierce
Diplomacy: The patriotic art of lying for one’s country.
– Ambrose Bierce
It is proof of a base and low mind for one to wish to think with the masses or majority, merely because the majority is the majority. Truth does not change because it is, or is not, believed by a majority of the people.
– Giordano Bruno
No one has ever succeeded in keeping nations at war except by lies.
– Salvador de Madariaga
A man who lies to himself, and believes his own lies, becomes unable to recognize truth, either in himself or in anyone else, and he ends up losing respect for himself and for others. When he has no respect for anyone, he can no longer love, and in him, he yields to his impulses, indulges in the lowest form of pleasure, and behaves in the end like an animal in satisfying his vices. And it all comes from lying to others and to yourself.
– Fyodor Dostoyevsky
The reality is, if we tell the truth, we only have to tell the truth once. If you lie, you have to keep lying forever.
– Rabbi Wayne Dosick
The modern susceptibility to conformity and obedience to authority indicates that the truth endorsed by authority is likely to be accepted as such by a majority of the people.
– David Edwards
Propaganda is persuading people to make up their minds while withholding some of the facts from them. Harold Evans
That’s not a lie, it’s a terminological inexactitude.
– Alexander Haig
The size of the lie is a definite factor in causing it to be believed, for the vast masses of a nation are in the depths of their hearts more easily deceived than they are consciously and intentionally bad. The primitive simplicity of their minds renders them a more easy prey to a big lie than a small one, for they themselves often tell little lies, but would be ashamed to tell big lies.
– Adolf Hitler
Those in possession of absolute power can not only prophesy and make their prophecies come true, but they can also lie and make their lies come true.
– Eric Hoffer
Truth always rests with the minority, and the minority is always stronger than the majority, because the minority is generally formed by those who really have an opinion, while the strength of a majority is illusory, formed by the gangs who have no opinion — and who, therefore, in the next instant (when it is evident that the minority is the stronger) assume its opinion … while Truth again reverts to a new minority.
– Soren Kierkegaard
Many people today don’t want honest answers insofar as honest means unpleasant or disturbing, They want a soft answer that turneth away anxiety.
– Louis Kronenberger
Not to be, but to seem, virtuous — it is a formula whose utility we all discovered in the nursery.
– C. S. Lewis
For the great majority of mankind are satisfied with appearances, as though they were realities, and are often more influenced by the things that seem than by those that are.
– Niccolo Machiavelli
Since the general civilization mankind, I believe there are more instances of the abridgment of freedoms of the people by gradual and silent encroachment of those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations.
– James Madison
Our government has kept us in a perpetual state of fear - kept us in a continuous stampede of patriotic fervour - with the cry of grave national emergency. Always, there has been some terrible evil at home, or some monstrous foreign power that was going to gobble us up if we did not blindly rally behind it.
– General Douglas MacArthur
People may or may not say what they mean…but they always say something designed to get what they want.
– David Mamet
Today the tyrant rules not by club or fist, but, disguised as a market researcher, he shepherds his flocks in the ways of utility and comfort.
– Marshall McLuhan
To die for an idea: it is unquestionably noble. But how much nobler it would be if men died for ideas that were true.
– H. L. Mencken
Everything we shut our eyes to, everything we run away from, everything we deny, denigrate or despise, serves to defeat us in the end. What seems nasty, painful, evil, can become a source of beauty, joy, and strength, if faced with an open mind.
– Henry Miller
For when they shall say, ‘Peace and Safety’, then sudden destruction comes upon them, as travail upon a women with child; and they shall not escape.
– St. Paul
Politics is supposed to be the second oldest profession. I have come to realize that it bears a very close resemblance to the first.
– Ronald Reagan
If you cannot convince them, confuse them
– Harry S. Truman
Hypocrisy is anything whatever may deceive the cleverest and most penetrating man, but the least wide-awake of children recognizes it, and is revolted by it, however ingeniously it may be disguised.
– Leo Nikolaevich Tolstoi
There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root.
– Henry David Thoreau
One death is a tragedy, but a million deaths are a statistic.
– Josef Stalin
Can we truly expect those who aim to exploit us to be trusted to educate us?
– Eric Schaub
It is not only old and early impressions that deceive us; the charms of novelty have the same power.-
– Blaise Pascal
“Why, I don’t exactly know about perjury, my dear sir,” replied the little gentleman. “Harsh word, my dear sir, very harsh word indeed. It’s a legal fiction, my dear sir, nothing more.”
– Charles Dickens – The Pickwick Papers
