Deception Quotes - Page 21

• For of all hard things to bear and grin, / The hardest is knowing you're taken in.

  Phoebe Cary

  Taken, Knowing, Bears

  Mary Clemmer, Alice Cary, Phoebe Cary (1873). “A Memorial of Alice and Phoebe Cary: With Some of Their Later Poems”, p.164

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• in politics as in life, what is known is not necessarily what is believed, what is shown is not necessarily what is seen, and what is said is not necessarily what is heard.

  Kathleen Hall Jamieson

  Politics, Said, Heard

  Kathleen Hall Jamieson (1993). “Dirty Politics: Deception, Distraction, and Democracy”, p.16, Oxford University Press on Demand

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• self-sacrifice is one of a woman's seven deadly sins (along with self-abuse, self-loathing, self-deception, self-pity, self-serving, and self-immolation).

  Sarah Ban Breathnach

  Sacrifice, Self, Abuse

  Sarah Ban Breathnach (2009). “Something More: Excavating Your Authentic Self”, p.98, Hachette UK

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• He who tries to protect himself from deception is often cheated, even when most on his guard.

  Plautus

  Trying, Protect, Cheated

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• There is no deception on the part of the woman, where a man bewilders himself: if he deludes his own wits, I can certainly acquit the women. Whatever man allows his mind to dwell upon the imprint his imagination has foolishly taken of women, is fanning the flames within himself -- and, since the woman knows nothing about it, she is not to blame. For if a man incites himself to drown, and will not restrain himself, it is not the water's fault.

  John Gower

  Taken, Men, Flames

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• Ruthven surmised that he had hit upon some of the central deceptions which had wrecked him and reduced him and so many of his colleagues to this condition. To surmise was not to conquer, of course; he was as helpless as ever but there was a dim liberation in seeing how he had been lied to, and he felt that at least he could take one thing from the terrible years through which he had come: he was free of self-delusion.

  Barry N. Malzberg

  Years, Self, Conquer

  Barry N. Malzberg (2007). “Breakfast in the Ruins”, p.207, Baen Publishing Enterprises

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• Wooden-headedness, the source of self-deception, is a factor that plays a remarkably large role in government. It consists in assessing a situation in terms of preconceived fixed notions while ignoring or rejecting any contrary signs. It is acting according to wish while not allowing oneself to be deflected by the facts.

  Barbara Tuchman

  Thinking, Government, Self

  Barbara Tuchman (2015). “The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam”, p.13, Crux Publishing Ltd

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• The reinvention of American culture as purely the self catapulted Las Vegas to prominence. The city took sin and made it choice -- a sometimes ambiguous choice, but choice nonetheless. Combined with a visionary approach to experience that melded Hollywood and Americans' taste for comfort and self-deception, Las Vegas grew into the last American frontier city, as foreign at times as Prague but as quintessential as Peoria. In Las Vegas, you can choose your fantasy; in the rest of America, you don't always get to pick.

  Hal Rothman

  Las Vegas, Self, Cities

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• Courage is the willingness to speak the truth about what you see and to own what you say.

  Seth

  Speak, Icarus, Willingness

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• When your art fails, make better art.

  Seth Godin

  Art, Failing, Icarus

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• We tend to tell strangers what we think will make us sound good. I myself, to my utter amazement, informed a telephone pollster that I exercised regularly, a bare-faced lie.

  Katha Pollitt

  Lying, Thinking, Sound

  Katha Pollitt (1995). “Reasonable Creatures: Essays on Women and Feminism”, Vintage

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• It is self-love and its offspring self-deception, which shut the gates of heaven, and lead men, as if in a delicious dream, to hell.

  Christian Scriver

  Dream, Men, Self

  Christian Scriver (1857). “Gotthold's Emblems: or Invisible things understood by things that are made. Tr. by R. Menzies”, p.128

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• I just can't believe that there won't come a day when people won't be fed-up with being overfed. That they won't get fed-up with the self-deception that all this fantastic food is the whole point of life.

  Gudrun Ensslin

  Believe, Self, People

  "Audiovisions: Cinema and Television as Entr'actes in History". Book by Siegfried Zielinski, 1999.

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• Police have both extra constraints and extra permissions - on the one hand, they can't dodge involvement in social disorder as the rest of us can and they may be required to conduct themselves privately in a way that does not undermine their public authority; on the other hand, they have permission to engage in deceptions, invasions of privacy and uses of force that are forbidden to the rest of us. But this does not put them beyond common morality.

  John Kleinig

  Police, Morality, Common

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• Any time we open ourselves up to fear, we fall prey to his deceptions and intimidations. Yet, if we submit our hearts to God and stand in faith, we can resist those first fearful thoughts. As we yield to God we can master our reactions to fear and the enemy will soon flee.

  Francis Frangipane

  Fall, Heart, Yield

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• Cosmologies are made up of small snippets of physical reality that have been remodeled by society into vast cosmic deceptions.

  Jeremy Rifkin

  Reality, Made, Cosmic

  "Reinventing Nature". Jeremy Rifkin, The Humanist Magazine, Volume 58 (p. 24), March/April 1998.

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• Art has no place in modern life. It will continue to exist as long as there is a mania for the romantic and so long as there are people who love beautiful lies and deception... Every modern cultured man must wage war against art, as against opium... Photograph and be photographed.

  Alexander Rodchenko

  Beautiful, Art, War

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• You bet I write disaster fiction. We have compiled a disastrous record on this planet, a record of stupidity and absurdity and self-abuse and self-aggrandizement and self-deception and pompousness and self-righteousness and cruelty and indifference beyond what any other species has demonstrated the capacity for, which is the capacity for all the above.

  John Irving

  Writing, Self, Stupidity

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• A lie's true power cannot be accurately measured by the number of people who believe its deception when it is told, it must be measured by the number of people who will go out after hearing it trying to convince others of its truth.

  Dennis Sharp

  Lying, Believe, True Power

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• Nostalgia for people, cultures, everything. There's an ability to use these marks to note things that are erased, deleted. Traces are a species of history, of evidence. It's a way for the way the narrator to construct a semblance of self, even though all of this creates a deception, a way to think of one's traces as a real way to define oneself. The trace is fallible, impermanent. It's one of the motives I had in mind throughout the text.

  Sergio Chejfec

  Real, Thinking, Self

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• If we consider my latest book, Strategie de la deception, what we need to focus on are the other aspects of the same phenomenon.

  Paul Virilio

  Book, Focus, Needs

  Source: ctheory.net

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• I think that there is an ongoing conspiracy in the philosophical community, an organized form of self-deception, as in a cult, to simply all together pretend that we knew what "first-person perspective" (or "quale" or "consciousness") means, so that we can keep our traditional debates running on forever.

  Thomas Metzinger

  Running, Philosophical, Mean

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• That's the old AA maxim, "Always have a drink in your hand and you'll never want a drink." That's one of the most classic deceptions in the literature: "I'll take a drink tomorrow." I actually don't think that's necessarily a very helpful maxim in AA, but it's a very good maxim in showing how strategic self-deception can be employed, even self-consciously. That's the amazing thing, to me, about self-deception.

  Clancy Martin

  Thinking, Literature, Helpful

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• When virtuous mental attitudes, like mindfulness, respect, and compassion, are invoked to justify nonvirtuous acts like hunting, fishing, and eating animal products, the mental attitudes are insincere. They are self-deceptions that we create to justify habits that in our hearts we know are wrong, but to which we have become attached.

  Norm Phelps

  Buddhist, Attitude, Heart

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• It is sometimes useful to pretend we are deceived, because when we show a deceiving man that we see through his artifices, we only encourage him to increase his deceptions.

  Madeleine de Souvre, marquise de Sable

  Men, Anarchy, Sometimes

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