The Nihilistic Troll might pretend to be acting in the service of some cause or leader, but don’t be fooled. The cause and their supposedly strong convictions are simply a way to justify and provide cover for their abusive behavior.

It is double pleasure to deceive the deceiver.

The female loves to play man against man. And if she is in a position to do it, there is not one who will resist.

We tell lies, yet it is easy to show that lying is immoral.

Propaganda is amazing. People can be led to believe anything.

It is wise to persuade people to do things and make them think it was their own idea.

What I’d really like to control is not machines, but people.

We do not see people as they are, but as they appear to us. And these appearances are usually misleading.

The public is not to see where power lies, how it shapes policy, and for what ends. Rather, people are to hate and fear one another.

It is more from carelessness about truth than from intentionally lying that there is so much falsehood in the world.

No man has a good enough memory to be a successful liar.

People need good lies. There are too many bad ones.

All the president is, is a glorified public relations man who spends his time flattering, kissing, and kicking people to get them to do what they are supposed to do anyway.

A creep is someone who claims he’s one thing but he’s actually another.

There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.

For the world to be interesting, you have to be manipulating it all the time.

There are many sham diamonds in this life which pass for real, and vice versa.

The trust of the innocent is the liar’s most useful tool.

The Joker that Christopher Nolan created in ‚The Dark Knight‘ had the scar across his mouth, and the first time you heard his explanation for it, he makes you believe that’s how he got it. But then you get into the film, and every time he talks about his scar, it’s a totally different story.

To Sun-tzu and the ancient Chinese, doing something extraordinary had little effect without a setup of something ordinary. You had to mix the two – to fix your opponent’s expectations with some banal, ordinary maneuver, a comfortable pattern that they would then expect you to follow.

One crime has to be concealed by another.

When a person cannot deceive himself the chances are against his being able to deceive other people.

Propaganda is to a democracy what the bludgeon is to a totalitarian state.

Knavery and flattery are blood relations.

In wartime, truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies.

The governments of the present day have to deal not merely with other governments, with emperors, kings and ministers, but also with the secret societies which have everywhere their unscrupulous agents, and can at the last moment upset all the governments‘ plans.

Power is the measure of the degree of control you have over circumstances in your life and the actions of the people around you. It is a skill that is developed by a deep understanding of human nature, of what truly motivates people, and of the manipulations necessary for advancement and protection.

The lie is a condition of life.

False face must hide what the false heart doth know.

I was a little worried that young people would think the only game was being political and manipulative when really the bigger game is being so good at what you do that nobody can argue with your results.

When governments rely increasingly on sophisticated public relations agencies, public debate disappears and is replaced by competing propaganda campaigns, with all the accompanying deceits. Advertising isn’t about truth or fairness or rationality, but about mobilising deeper and more primitive layers of the human mind.

Falsehood is easy, truth so difficult.

There is hardly anything in the world that some man cannot make a little worse and sell a little cheaper, and the people who consider price only are this man’s lawful prey.

The only thing worse than a liar is a liar that’s also a hypocrite!

Language is a weapon of politicians, but language is a weapon in much of human affairs.

Richard Nixon is a no good, lying bastard. He can lie out of both sides of his mouth at the same time, and if he ever caught himself telling the truth, he’d lie just to keep his hand in.

The one charm about marriage is that it makes a life of deception absolutely necessary for both parties.

It is better to be deceived by one’s friends than to deceive them.

By and large, language is a tool for concealing the truth.

Deceiving others. That is what the world calls a romance.

The truth is, I’ve never fooled anyone. I’ve let men sometimes fool themselves.

There are a terrible lot of lies going about the world, and the worst of it is that half of them are true.

Keep people off-balance and in the dark by never revealing the purpose behind your actions. If they have no clue what you are up to, they cannot prepare a defense.

You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time.

If you’re lying, you’re lying.

It’s plain hokum. If you can’t convince ‚em, confuse ‚em. It’s an old political trick. But this time it won’t work.

Sensual love deceives one as to the nature of heavenly love; it could not do so alone, but since it unconsciously has the element of heavenly love within it, it can do so.

The liar’s punishment is not in the least that he is not believed, but that he cannot believe anyone else.

I was mischievous. I wasn’t bad. I stole food so we could eat. My mother didn’t know. I used to tell her some man gave me $10 to sweep out the yard. I was like Robin Hood. I took from the rich and gave to the poor. Me.

Lying is not only saying what isn’t true. It is also, in fact especially, saying more than is true and, in the case of the human heart, saying more than one feels. We all do it, every day, to make life simpler.

The more you can increase fear of drugs and crime, welfare mothers, immigrants and aliens, the more you control all the people.

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.

When I was young, an eccentric uncle decided to teach me how to lie. Not, he explained, because he wanted me to lie, but because he thought I should know how it’s done so I would recognise when I was being lied to.

If you think you can slander a woman into loving you, or a man into voting for you, try it till you are satisfied.

When our governments want to sell us a course of action, they do it by making sure it’s the only thing on the agenda, the only thing everyone’s talking about. And they pre-load the ensuing discussion with highly selected images, devious and prejudicial language, dubious linkages, weak or false ‚intelligence‘ and selected ‚leaks.‘

When the tyrant has disposed of foreign enemies by conquest or treaty, and there is nothing more to fear from them, then he is always stirring up some war or other, in order that the people may require a leader.

For the bureaucrat, the world is a mere object to be manipulated by him.

Everybody, to some extent, manipulates. Even children learn to cry when they want something. There are all kinds of subtle things we do to get others to follow our lead, not bother us, and so on.

I am called a dog because I fawn on those who give me anything, I yelp at those who refuse, and I set my teeth in rascals.

Since the child knew his parents would give in, he tried the same trick again and again.

Governments are supposed to lie to their citizens.