Nadine Gordimer Quotes

Generally our confidences move downward rather than upward; in our secret affairs, we employ our inferiors much more than our bettors.

As we ascend the social ladder, viciousness wears a thicker mask.

Strange bonds of trust and self-deception tend to grow between journalists and their subjects.

I place an enormous premium on loyalty. If someone betrays me, I can forgive them rationally, but emotionally I have found it impossible to do so.

Men want to think women don't cheat, and women want men to think they don't cheat, and therefore the sexes have been playing a little psychological game with each other.

In the Middle East persons were more trusted than institutions.

I think that everybody, at one time or another, has been betrayed and lied to, and it's about the pain, and it's about the healing process, and it's about how do you get past that and move on.

I am afraid that woman appreciate cruelty, downright cruelty, more than anything else. They have wonderfully primitive instincts. We have emancipated them, but they remain slaves looking for their masters, all the same. They love being dominated.

I have discovered that a famed familiarity in great ones is a note of certain usurpation on the less; for great and popular men feign themselves to be servants to others to make those slaves to them.

Maybe—just maybe—Sadie had my best interests at heart. (I just caught her making faces at me, so maybe not.)

The most disagreeable thing that your worst enemy says to your face does not approach what your best friends say behind your back.

Socialism: nothing more than the theory that the slave is always more virtuous than his master.

When a woman says she will obey you, of her own will, it is time to sleep lightly and watch your back.

There were people whom I considered friends or loved ones who either abandoned me or betrayed me in ways I'd never have suspected. But there were others who had been barely acquaintances of mine whose loyalty and efforts on my behalf made me realize that not everyone was as inherently rotten as I'd previously believed. So it caused a violent split in my view of humanity - people turned out to be far worse and far better than I'd ever dreamed possible.

You don't become completely free by just avoiding being a slave; you also need to avoid becoming a master.

Good masters generally have bad slaves, and bad slaves have good masters.

Never, never trust anyone who asks for white wine. It means they're phonies.

Don't worry about appeasing the establishment. Don't acquiesce to an alleged power. Be with the people, not the establishment. The guy that's sitting next to you, that's who you got to beware. Judas was sitting right next to Jesus.

I am affected, not because you have deceived me, but because I can no longer believe in you.

That's your first mistake. Do not trust me.

Never trust a species that grins all the time. It’s up to something.

there are only two basic ways of structuring the relations between the female and male halves of humanity. All societies are patterned on either a dominator model - in which human hierarchies are ultimately backed up by force or the threat of force - or a partnership model, with variations in between.

As a businessman, you have to trust people. To find two people who lied the way [Vick and Petrino] lied, that's unique and that's not Arthur's fault. It's not a flaw of Arthur's. It's a flaw of these two guys.

Problem with these other niggas they aint never real

To Xeniades, who had purchased Diogenes at the slave market, he said, "Come, see that you obey orders."