It is the cult of self that is killing the United States. This cult has within it the classic traits of psychopaths: superficial charm, grandiosity and self-importance ; a need for constant stimulation; a penchant for lying, deception and manipulation; and the incapacity for remorse or guilt.
— Chris Hedges
Mind-blowing Lying And Deception quotations
Deceivers are the most dangerous members of society.
They trifle with the best affections of our nature, and violate the most sacred obligations.
Among other common lies, we have the silent lie - the deception which one conveys by simply keeping still and concealing the truth. Many obstinate truth-mongers indulge in this dissipation, imagining that if they speak no lie, they lie not at all.
The visionary lies to himself, the liar only to others.
Above all, don't lie to yourself.
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.
Art is a deception that creates real emotions - a lie that creates a truth.
And when you give yourself over to that deception, it becomes magic.
The statesmen will invent cheap lies, putting the blame upon the nation that is being attacked, and every man will be glad of these conscience-soothing falsities
The statesmen will invent cheap lies, putting the blame upon the nation that is attacked, and every man will be glad of those conscience-soothing falsities, and will diligently study them, and refuse to examine any refutations of them; and thus he will by and by convince himself that the war is just, and will thank God for the better sleep he enjoys after this process of grotesque self-deception.
Men were considered "free" only so that they might be considered guilty - could be judged and punished: consequently, every act had to be considered as willed, and the origin of every act had to be considered as lying within the consciousness (and thus the most fundamental psychological deception was made the principle of psychology itself).
Above all, do not lie to yourself.
Lying to ourselves is more deeply ingrained than lying to others.
By a lie a man throws away and, as it were, annihilates his dignity as a man.
A man who himself does not believe what he tells another ... has even less worth than if he were a mere thing. ... makes himself a mere deceptive appearance of man, not man himself.
The press can't write the kind of things they write, which are lies.
The stories are fabrications and false. And the only thing I say is hopefully, hopefully, our patriotic movement will overcome this terrible deception.
Imagination is the deceptive part in man, the mistress of error and falsehood.
One of Satan's most deceptive and powerful ways of defeating us is to get us to believe a lie. And the biggest lie is that there are no consequences to our own doing. Satan will give you whatever you ask for if it will lead you where he ultimately wants you.
Wisdom is looking at life from God's point of view.
You look at life's difficulties and tests as God looks at them. You look at family life and child rearing as God looks at them. You interpret current events as God would interpret them. You see the truth even though all around you are deception and lies.
Somewhere between the honest truth and the deceptive lie is the deceptive truth and the honest lie.
The Good News means we can stop lying to ourselves.
The sweet sound of amazing grace saves us from the necessity of self-deception. It keeps us from denying that though Christ was victorious, the battle with lust, greed, and pride still rages within us.
I don't think you fully appreciate the importance of Illusion in life, the Essential Nature of Lies and Deception of the body politic.
When a liar became too skilled at deception, he could lose the ability to discern truth, and could himself be more easily deceived.
The foundation of morality is to have done, once and for all, with lying.
An honorable man or woman is one who is truthful;
free from deceit; above cheating, lying, stealing, or any form of deception. An honorable man or woman is one who learns early that one cannot do wrong and feel right. A man's character is judged on how he keeps his word and his agreements.
"A man inferior with the blade or with his thoughts can still so elevate himself," Entreri explained curtly, "if he can impart the belief that some god or other speaks through him. It is the greatest deception in all the world and one embraced by kings and lords, while the minor lying thieves on the streets or Calimport and other cities lose their tongues for so attempting to coax the purses of others."
All deception in the course of life is indeed nothing else but a lie reduced to practice, and falsehood passing from words into things.
The foreground in a picture is always unattractive.
.. Art demands that the interest of the canvas should be placed in the far distance, where lies take refuge, those dreams which blossom out of fact and are man's only love.
I lie to myself all the time. But I never believe me.
Man seems to be an animal whose capacity for lies is only equalled by his credulity; it does no good to let battalions of cats outof bags, to produce whole harems of naked facts, people eat the same three meals daily deception, and are always ready to turn with fury upon the purveyors of bagless cats and facts undraped. Probably their instinct is wise. Who knows?
The chance that any given sentence is a lie, rather than a truth, I think, is fairly great. An intentional lie, a self-deception, a misconception - there are lots of categories of untruth, not one grab bag. And hotographs can reveal something to us, and they can also conceal things.
When you start to realise how much of what you've constructed of yourself is based on deception and lies, that is a horrifying realisation.
It should be obvious that this pattern of systematic holes and gaps in Iraq's declaration is not the result of accidents, editing oversights or technical mistakes. These are material omissions that - in our view - constitute another material breach. It is up to Iraq to prove that there is some other explanation besides the obvious one, that this declaration is just one more act of deception in a history of lies from a defiant dictator.
Such letters...from the FDA, are, filled with objectively demonstrable lies, practiced deceptions and deviousness, red herrings, directed misinformation, misdirected information, etc. ...Once FDA-NCI-AMA-ACS...concedes that Laetrile anti-tumor efficacy was indeed even once observed...a permanent crack in bureaucratic armor has taken place.
I became a virtuoso of deceit. It wasn't pleasure I was after, it was knowledge. I consulted the strictest moralists to learn how to appear, philosophers to find out what to think and novelists to see what I could get away with.
What I warn you to remember is that I am a detective.
Our relationship with truth is fundamental but cracked, refracting confusingly like fragmented glass. It is the core of our careers, the endgame of every move we make, and we pursue it with strategies painstakingly constructed of lies and concealment and every variation on deception.
You just sit there and tolerate it, the same way everything in this country is tolerated. Every deception, every lie, every bullet in the brains. Just as you are already tolerating bullets in the brains that will be implemented only after the bullet is put in your brains.
LOVE: Deception of the flesh and damage to the spirit.
Disease of the soul, atrophy of the brain, weakening of the heart, corruption of the senses, poetic lies from which one gets ferociously inebriated two or three times a day in order to consume this precious but stupid life more quickly. And yet I would prefer to die of love. Its the only swindler, after Judas, that can kill with a kiss.
Grace is always natural, though that does not prevent its being often used to hide a lie. The rude shocks and uncomfortably constraining influences of life disappear among graceful women and poetical men; they are the most deceptive beings in creation; distrust and doubt cannot stand before them; they create what they imagine; if they do not lie to others, they do to their own hearts; for illusion is their element, fiction their vocation, and pleasures in appearance their happiness. Beware of grace in woman, and poetry in man -- weapons the more dangerous because the least dreaded!
Deception, machination and mendacity lie at the core of human intelligence, like worms coiled at the core of a apple
Lesson number one in trying to develop the ability of independent thought: Understand that EVERYTHING the government says has the potential to be lies and deception. You can believe it's the truth only after you question, exhaust every avenue, and find that their story checks out. If you're a patriot, it's your duty to always question your government anyway, at every turn. A patriot is loyal to his country and his countrymen, not his government.
Fearful leaders side-step issues instead of dealing with them, cover up mistakes instead of owning up to mistakes; they skulk back into the shadows and hope that the crisis-whatever it is-will somehow blow over instead of facing their fears. Worse, they resort to lies and deception to cover up the truth.
The theatre has always been to me a place where beautiful lies are told, and playwrighting the orchestration of platitudes around a central flaw in logic or a ridiculous idea. Acting — the disguise and impersonation — is an art of deception.
Maturity is the ability to sort the portions of truth from the accepted lies and self-deceptions that you have grown up with.
While a forgery illegally exploits the elitist taste for rarity, a kitsch object insists on its anti elitist availability. The deceptive character of kitsch does not lie in whatever it may have in common with actual forgery but in its claim to supply its consumers with essentially the same kinds and qualities of beauty as those embodied in unique or rare and inaccessible originals.
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.
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.