Social Deception Quotes

They are playing a game. They are playing at not playing a game. If I show them I see they are, I shall break the rules and they will punish me. I must play their game, of not seeing I see the game.

Make-believe has so long held sway that truth arrives on the scene with all the aspect of an ogre. As a consequence, the real history of their country is a sealed book to the vast majority of the Irish. They neither ask for it nor is it given them.

I am prepared to maintain that Honesty is essentially an anarchistic and disintegrating force in society, that communities are held together and the progress of civilization made possible only by vigorous and sometimes even, violent Lying; that the Social Contract is nothing more or less than a vast conspiracy of human beings to lie and humbug themselves and one another for the general Good.

We live in a permanent state of bad faith, a mutual representation of ourselves to one another for the sake of remaining sane and following our biological imperative to continue as a species.

Men are valued, not for what they are, but for what they seem to be.

In society, one doesn't tell the truth, one tells the exact opposite.

For nearly a century, the South made itself believe that Negroes and white people were really communicating. So convinced of this were the white Southerners that they almost made the nation believe that they, and only they, knew the mind of the Southern Negro.

Moral severity in women is only a dress or paint which they use to set off their beauty.

The moment a man talks to his fellows he begins to lie.

The devil is only a convenient myth invented by the real malefactors of our world.

Hypocrisy is a fashionable vice, and all fashionable vices pass for virtue.

Lying is our stock-in-trade as social creatures.

ARTLESSNESS, n. A certain engaging quality to which women attain by long study and severe practice upon the admiring male, who is pleased to fancy it resembles the candid simplicity of his young.

People would not long remain in social life if they were not the dupes of each other.

as everybody knows, truthfulness and agreeable manners are often divorced on the ground of incompatibility.

An attempt to gain a value by deceiving the mind of others is an act of raising your victims to a position higher than reality.

The more clearly one sees this world; the more one is obliged to pretend it does not exist.

Bourgeois morality is largely a system of making cheap virtues a cloak for expensive vices.

False opinions are like false money, struck first of all by guilty men and thereafter circulated by honest people who perpetuate the crime without knowing what they are doing

She'd also called me brave...unless she was talking to the catfish.

I don't think you fully appreciate the importance of Illusion in life, the Essential Nature of Lies and Deception of the body politic.

We like nonfiction, and we live in fictitious times.

Man is the creature that cannot emerge from himself, that knows his fellows only in himself; when he asserts the contrary, he is lying.

There would not be any absolute necessity for reserve if the world were honest; yet even then it would prove expedient. For, in order to attain any degree of deference, it seems necessary that people should imagine you have more accomplishments than you discover.