Swami Vivekananda Quotes

What, I should only trust good people? Man, good people get bought and sold every day. Might as well trust somebody evil once in a while, it makes no more or less sense.

I'm an old cynic.

Truth made you a traitor as it often does in a time of scoundrels.

To vice, innocence must always seem only a superior kind of chicanery.

When I saw corruption, I was forced to find truth on my own. I couldn't swallow the hypocrisy.

We suppose mankind more honest than they are.

… politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred and schizophrenia

The world is an old woman, and mistakes any gilt farthing for a gold coin; whereby being often cheated, she will thenceforth trust nothing but the common copper.

I hate all explanations; they who make them deceive either themselves or the other party,-generally both.

O what fine thought we had because we thought that the worst rogues and rascals had died out.

Misanthropy ariseth from a man trusting another without having sufficient knowledge of his character, and, thinking him to be truthful, sincere, and honourable, finds a little afterwards that he is wicked, faithless, and then he meets with another of the same character. When a man experiences this often, and more particularly from those whom he considered his most dear and best friends, at last, having frequently made a slip, he hates the whole world, and thinks that there is nothing sound at all in any of them.

Some of my most neurotically fierce bitterness is the result of realizing how untrue people have become.

Her last conscious thought was disgust at life; her senses had lied to her. The world was not made of energy and delight but of foulness, betrayal, and lassitude. Living was hateful, and death was no better, and from end to end of the universe this was the first and last and only truth.

You and I have never seen democracy; all we've seen is hypocrisy.

That's the trouble with you preachers," he said. "You've all got too good to believe in anything," and he drove off with a look of disgust and righteousness.

Take the humbug out of this world, and you haven't much left to do business with.

There is less misery in being cheated than in that kind of wisdom which perceives, or thinks it perceives, that all mankind are cheats.

We are suffering from a believism that never has believed, and a receivism that never has received, and it leads to deceivism.

That's why they call it the American Dream, because you have to be asleep to believe it.

If yee would know a knave, give him a staffe.

Of all things in the world that stink in the nostrils of men, hypocrisy is the worst.

And many more Destructions played In this ghastly masquerade, All disguised, even to the eyes, Like Bishops, lawyers, peers, or spies.

You say you’re sick, huh? Well, it looks like you’ve come down with a case of bullshit.

Those who are overreached by our cunning are far from appearing to us as ridiculous as we appear to ourselves when the cunning of others has overreached us.