Browse through our collection of quotes tagged with Deception/lying.
It is the nature of ambition to make men liars and cheats, to hide the truth in their breasts, and show, like jugglers, another thing in their mouths, to cut all friendships and enmities to the measure of their own interest, and to make a good countenance without the help of good will.
Kenneth Tynan
The justification for those actions was that we were living in a very hard, predatory, cloak-and-dagger world and that the only way to deal with a totalitarian enemy was to intimidate him. The trouble with this theory was that while we live in a world of plot and counterplot, we also live in a world of cause and effect. Whatever the cause for the decision to legitimize and regularize deceit abroad, the inevitable effect was the practice of deceit at home.
Norman Cousins, Pathology of Pow
Life is the art of being well deceived.
William Hazlitt
Cunning is the art of concealing our own defects, and discovering the weaknesses of others.
The craftiest trickery are too short and ragged a cloak to cover a bad heart.
Johann Kaspar Lavater
He who has made it a practice to lie and deceive his father, will be the most daring in deceiving others.
Horace
Every government is run by liars and nothing they say should be believed.
I. F. Stone
It is sometimes necessary to lie damnably in the interests of the nation.
Hilaire Belloc
It contains a misleading impression, not a lie. It was being economical with the truth.
Robert Armstrong
We lie loudest when we lie to ourselves.
Eric Hoffer
If one is to be called a liar, one may as well make an effort to deserve the name.
A.A. (Alan Alexandra) Milne
Time passes, and little by little everything that we have spoken in falsehood becomes true.
Marcel Proust
Lies are essential to humanity. They are perhaps as important as the pursuit of pleasure and moreover are dictated by that pursuit.
I can't say I haven't lied but I can say that I lied to tell the truth.
James Dye
A liar is full of oaths.
Pierre Corneille
There is nothing in the world more shameful than establishing one's self on lies and fables.
Johann von Goethe
A lie can run around the world before the truth can get it's boots on.
James Watt
If you wish to strengthen a lie, mix a little truth in with it.
Zohar
To give up pretensions is as blessed a relief as to get them ratified.
William James
The people of the world having once been deceived, suspect deceit in truth itself.
Hitopadesa
