Jean Cocteau Quotes

Be careful what you do, because the lie becomes the truth.

The world is a lie...not you and me.

Is not this whole world an illusion? And yet it fools everybody.

Well, when I was younger, I lied all the time, because once you understand the power of lying, it's really like magic because you transform reality for people.

Life is the art of being well deceived; and in order that the deception may succeed it must be habitual and uninterrupted.

The art of living is the art of knowing how to believe lies.

He spent his whole life in plastering together the true and the false and therefrom extracting the plausible.

We're all living in some state of illusion, even if modestly.

Disinformation is more than just lying: it's the denial and twisting of reality in order to present some desired image to the rest of the world.

Appearances are not reality; but they often can be a convincing alternative to it. You can control appearances most of the time, but facts are what they are. When the facts are too sharp, you can craft a cheerful version of the situation and cover the facts the way that you can covered a battered old four-slice toaster with a knitted cozy featuring images of kittens.

Like an audience entertained by a magician, we allow ourselves to be deceived by those with a stake in persuading us to ignore reality.

The thing is too that when you sell people a false reality and they take that to be the norm, when that false reality is light-years from what’s really happening, that in itself is a tremendous defense mechanism because when you start talking about what is actually happening, it is so different from what people perceive to be happening. They just can’t make that jump; it’s too insane for them.

They kept the lie going, and the people loved it.

People think that a liar gains a victory over his victim. What I’ve learned is that a lie is an act of self-abdication, because one surrenders one’s reality to the person to whom one lies, making that person one’s master, condemning oneself from then on to faking the sort of reality that person’s view requires to be faked…The man who lies to the world, is the world’s slave from then on…There are no white lies, there is only the blackest of destruction, and a white lie is the blackest of all.

Donald Trump doesn't have clear contact with reality, though I'm not sure it qualifies as a bona fide delusion. He needs things to be a certain way even though they aren't, and that's one reason he lies. There can also be a conscious manipulative element to it. When he put forward, and politically thrived on, the falsehood of President Obama's birth in Kenya, outside the United States, he was manipulating that lie as well as undoubtedly believing it in part, at least in a segment of his personality.

Truman Capote has made lying an art. A minor art.

Every race, every art has its hypocrisy. The world is fed with a little truth and many lies.

The truth is still the truth whether or not you believe it. Can we say the same about lies? No, lies only exist because we believe them. If we don't believe in lies, they simply disappear.

The reason why most people are frustrated is because a lie cannot be turned into a truth.

Something therefore always remains and sticks from the most imprudent of lies, a fact which all bodies and individuals concerned in the art of lying in this world know only too well, and therefore they stop at nothing to achieve this end.

A lie was something that hadn't happened but might just as well have.

A thing may happen and be a total lie; another thing may not happen and be truer than the truth.

By repetition, each lie becomes an irreversible fact upon which other lies are constructed.

There are only two types of people in the world. There are the people who understand that this is a matrix, and then there are the people who buy it lock, stock and barrel.

I guess entertainment means blatantly lyin'