“I have always considered it as treason against the great republic of human nature, to make any man's virtues the means of deceiving him.”
“You can fool some of the people all the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all the time.”
“It seems to me that there are two kinds of trickery: the ''fronts'' people assume before one another's eyes, and the ''front'' a writer puts on the face of reality.”
“Whenever, therefore, people are deceived and form opinions wide of the truth, it is clear that the error has slid into their minds through the medium of certain resemblances to that truth.”
“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. And, in the end, I distilled everything down to one wonderfully simple principle: win or die.”
“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.”