Browse through our collection of quotes tagged with Deception/lying.
Nothingever happened on this globe, for good, at which some people did not have their fill of laughter in the onset; and knowing that such as these would be blind anyway, he thought it quite as well that they should wrinkle up their eyes in grins, as have a malady in the less attractive forms.
Charles Dickens
Lying is a terrible vice, it testifies that one despises God, but fears men.
Michel de Montaigne
He who is not very strong in memory should not meddle with lying.
In plain truth, lying is an accursed vice. We are not men, nor have any other tie upon another, but by our word.
I do myself a greater injury in lying that I do him of whom I tell a lie.
The easiest way to be cheated is to believe yourself to be more cunning than others.
Pierre Charron
I would dodge, not lie, in the national interest.
Larry Speakes
All deception in the course of life is indeed nothing else but a lie reduced to practice, and falsehood passing from words into things.
Robert Southey
Truth will lose its credit, if delivered by a person that has none.
Bishop Robert South
Whoever is detected in a shameful fraud is ever after not believed even if they speak the truth.
Phaedrus
Semiotics is concerned with everything that can be taken as a sign. A sign is everything which can be taken as significantly substituting for something else. This something else does not necessarily have to exist or to actually be somewhere at the moment in which a sign stands in for it. Thus semiotics is in principle the discipline studying everything which can be used in order to lie. If something cannot be used to tell a lie, conversely it cannot be used to tell the truth; it cannot in fact be used 'to tell' at all. I think that the definition of a 'theory of the lie' should be taken as a pretty comprehensive program for a general semiotics.
Umberto Eco, Theory of Semiotics
The great advantages of simulation and dissimulation are three. First to lay asleep opposition and to surprise. For where a man's intentions are published, it is an alarum to call up all that are against them. The second is to reserve a man's self a fair retreat: for if a man engage himself, by a manifest declaration, he must go through, or take a fall. The third is, the better to discover the mind of another. For to him that opens himself, men will hardly show themselves adverse; but will fair let him go on, and turn their freedom of speech to freedom of thought.
Francis Bacon
For nothing can seem foul to those that win.
William Shakespeare
Never chase a lie. Let it alone, and it will run itself to death. I can work out a good character much faster than anyone can lie me out of it
Lyman Beecher
All lies and jests, still a man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest.
Paul Simon
Everyone is born sincere and die deceivers.
Marquis De Vauvenargues
With lies you may go ahead in the world, but you can never go back.
Proverb
When a man lies, he murders some part of the world.
Merlin
Lying and stealing are next door neighbors.
Arabic Proverb
Lying rides upon debt's back.
Benjamin Franklin
