Children and fools cannot lie.
—John Heywood, 1546Quotes
There was no treachery too base for the world to commit.
—Virginia Woolf, 1927You can put wings on a pig, but you don’t make it an eagle.
—Bill Clinton, 1996Honesty, for me, is usually the worst policy imaginable.
—Patricia Highsmith, 1960Grow your tree of falsehood from a small grain of truth.
—Czeslaw Milosz, 1946Anyone who’s never experienced the pleasure of betrayal doesn’t know what pleasure is.
—Jean Genet, 1986If you find excrement somewhere in the village, the chief was the one who put it there.
—Congolese proverbCredulity forges more miracles than trickery could invent.
—Joseph Joubert, 1811We have to distrust each other. It is our only defense against betrayal.
—Tennessee Williams, 1953The poor man is ruined as soon as he begins to ape the rich.
—Publilius Syrus, c. 50 BCMen were born to lie, and women to believe them.
—John Gay, 1728An honest man is all right even if he’s an idiot…but a crook must have brains.
—Maxim Gorky, 1902Alongside all swindlers the state now stands there as swindler-in-chief.
—Jacob Burckhardt, c. 1875