Richard Cohen Quotes

Extreme narcissists exaggerate their achievements and talents, and so Trump has spent his life building up a false image of himself - not just for others, but for himself, to protect his deeply fragile ego. He lies endlessly, not just in the way sociopaths do, which is to con others, but also to delude himself.

The easiest person to deceive is one's self.

If you live in bad faith, lies will appear to you like the truth.

Humans are born in truth, but we grow up believing in lies.

Truth is not always the best basis for happiness. There are certain lies which may constitute a far better and more secure foundation of happiness. There are people who perish when their eyes are opened.

I tell myself lies and soon I believe them.

I've studied pathological liars, and anything they say, they believe, and that's one of the reasons they're so convincing, because they have no connection with the truth. It's a dead issue. It's like they're color-blind to the truth. So anything that comes out of their mouths is their reality.

Nothing fools you better than the lie you tell yourself.

An ideology is a complex of ideas or notions which represents itself to the thinker as an absolute truth for the interpretation of the world and his situation within it; it leads the thinker to accomplish an act of self-deception for the purpose of justification, obfuscation and evasion in some sense or other

A man who lies to himself, and believes his own lies, becomes unable to recognize truth, either in himself or in anyone else.

If people tell an untruth long enough and loud enough, they begin to believe it themselves.

Man has an inexhuastible faculty for lying, especially to himself.

I know my lies are always wishes.

The greater your powers of self-delusion, the greater will be the apparent efficacy of this untruth.

Belief in the lie is the life of the lie.

But an Adrian also knew that an Adrian's lies were real: they were lived and felt and acted out as thoroughly as another man's truths - if other men had truths - and he believed it possible that this last lie might see him through to the grave.

I'm really interested in self-deception. Really interested in how people live in bubble universes. How people can fail to see the seemingly obvious.

The easiest lies to tell are the ones you want to be true.

In order to maintain our way of living, we must tell lies to each other, and especially to ourselves.

We are our own aptest deceiver.

The truth doesn't always set you free; people prefer to believe prettier, neatley wrapped lies

The most common sort of lie is the one uttered to one's self.

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.

You can fool yourself, you know. You'd think it's impossible, but it turns out it's the easiest thing of all.

Deception is mostly a game we play with ourselves.