Jane Jacobs Quotes

Camouflage is a game we all like to play, but our secrets are as surely revealed by what we want to seem to be as by what we want to conceal.

In our lives in a lot of ways it's all about fake. You've got people wanting things for fake reasons.

I didn't come to Hollywood. Hollywood came to me. A lot of people wish they could say the things I say. Everyone out here is so phony, it's sickening.

I'm really good at pretending.

The Tao of Jen was very much the Tao of hiding everything that didn't look good. The Tao of Jen is wearing a cocktail dress with underwear with holes in it. The Tao of Jen is all style and no substance.

Style equals pretense.

I don't like Drake as a person. He's just fake to me.

I can't stand fake people. I can feel it when someone feigns it.

Affectation hath always had a greater share both in the action and discourse of men than truth and judgment have.

Deception, flattering, lying, deluding, talking behind the back, putting up a false front, living in borrowed splendor, wearing a mask, hiding behind convention, playing a role for others and for oneself -- in short, a continuous fluttering around the solitary flame of vanity -- is so much the rule and the law among men that there is almost nothing which is less comprehensible than how an honest and pure drive for truth could have arisen among them.

Being natural is simply a pose, and the most irritating pose I know.

Vice knows [its] ugly, so [it] puts on [a] mask.

When he admitted this to me, I found myself almost annoyed. It was as if he'd hidden this part of himself in order to deceive me, pretending-- as do many people I've discovered--to be what he is not. No one I've ever known is what he appears to be on the surface.

It is easier to pretend to be what you are not than to hide what you really are; but he that can accomplish both has little to learn in hypocrisy.

It's a Barnum and Bailey world, Just as phony as it can be...

You see how fake it all is. It's not even hard enough to be made out of plastic. It's a paper town.

Thus 'tis with all; their chief and constant care Is to seem everything but what they are.

Truth at last cannot be hidden. Dissimulation is of no avail. Dissimulation is to no purpose before so great a judge. Falsehood puts on a mask. Nothing is hidden under the sun.

Truth is for tailors and shoemakers. I, on the contrary, have always held that the Lord has a penchant for masquerades.

People were standing up everywhere shouting, "This is me! This is me!" Every time you looked at them they stood up and told you who they were, and the truth of it was that they had no more idea who or what they were than he had. They believed their flashing signs, too. They ought to be standing up and shouting, "This isn't me! This isn't me!" They would if they had any decency. "This isn't me!" Then you might know how to proceed through the flashing bullshit of this world.

Affected simplicity is an elegant imposture.

There are people who believe everything is sane and sensible that is done with a solemn face. ... It is no great art to say something briefly when, like Tacitus, one has something to say; when one has nothing to say, however, and none the less writes a whole book and makes truth ... into a liar - that I call an achievement.

Dissimulation, even the most innocent in its nature, is ever productive of embarrassment; whether the design is evil or not artifice is always dangerous and almost inevitably disgraceful.

What humbugs we are, who pretend to live for beauty, and never see the dawn!

Deceit is a kind of garment that conceals the soul. It might even be compared to a whole wardrobe, so many are its guises.