Ernest Hemingway Quotes

[Theodore Roosevelt] has sold himself to the devil and will live up to the bargain.

When you're surrounded by a world of constant lies, manipulation, and deceit, that dark energy is bound to seep into you eventually.

The devil comes in many guises-anger in the form of justice-passion in the form of duty. When it first comes, the man knows and then he forgets. Just as your pleaders' conscience; at first they know it is all Badmashi (roguery), then it is duty to their clients; at last they get hardened.

Inauthenticity is endemic in American politics today. The political backrooms where I spent much of my career were just as benighted as my personal life, equally crowded with shadowy strangers and compromises, truths I hoped to deny. I lived not in one closet but in many.

I lie, I cheat, and I steal.

Whenever there are great virtues, it's a sure sign something's wrong.

White lies always introduce others of a darker complexion.

Necessity makes an honest man a knave.

… they seem to be such as would not swear, whore, nor be drunk, but they would lie, cozen and deceive.

If you do not know how to lie, cheat and steal, turn your attention to politics and learn.

No matter how healthy a man's morals may be when he enters the White House, he comes out again with a pock-marked soul.

Unnatural deeds Do breed unnatural troubles: infected minds To their deaf pillows will discharge their secrets.

There is a taint of death, a flavour of mortality in lies.

Once you tell your first lie, the first time you lie for him, you are in it with him, and then you are lost.

Then no rightful cause was left, and the pain of anger was turning into the shameful pain of submission. He had no right to condemn anyone - he thought - to denounce anything, to fight and die joyously, claiming the sanctity of virtue. The broken promises, the unconfessed desires, the betrayal, the deceit, the lies, the fraud - he was guilty of them all. What form of corruption could he scorn? Degrees do not matter, he thought; one does not bargain about inches of evil.

When one feels no shame in telling a deliberate lie, there is no evil, I tell you, he will not do.

As Angelo discovered in Measure for Measure, nothing corrupts like virtue.

He who permits himself to tell a lie once, finds it much easier to do it a second and third time, till at length it becomes habitual; he tells lies without attending to it, and truths without the world's believing him. This falsehood of the tongue leads to that of the heart, and in time depraves all its good dispositions.

False words are not only evil in themselves, but they infect the soul with evil.

Lies like that are not a sin, they are a sacrifice.

When a man sells eleven ounces for twelve, he makes a compact with the devil, and sells himself for the value of an ounce.

A man who sells his conscience for his interest will sell it for his pleasure. A man who will betray his country will betray his friend.

If power corrupts, weakness in the seat of power, with its constant necessity of deals and bribes and compromising arrangements,corrupts even more.

There are worse things than a lie... I have found... that it may be well to choose one sin in order that another may be shunned.

His mind reeled. Now, empowered to ask questions of utmost rudeness-and promised answers-he could, conceivably (though it was almost unimaginable), ask someone, some adult, his father perhaps: "Do you lie?" But he would have no way of knowing if the answer he received was true.