Cesare Pavese Quotes

The first step towards vice is to shroud innocent actions in mystery, and whoever likes to conceal something sooner or later has reason to conceal it.

In my experience in Washington, when people refuse to come clean, it is usually because they are hiding dirty laundry.

Ambition drove many men to become false; to have one thought locked in the breast, another ready on the tongue.

And, believe me; they will do everything to cover this up.

Ambition is the mother of hypocrisy and prefers to skulk in corners and dark places. It cannot endure the light of day. It is an unclean vice wallowing in the depths, always hidden, but with ever an eye to advancement.

Secrecy is the badge of fraud.

Dissimulation creeps gradually into the minds of men.

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.

Maintaining silence about a dirty truth is another way of lying, a common practice in high places.

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

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

Everybody lies...every day, every hour, awake, asleep, in his dreams, in his joy, in his mourning. If he keeps his tongue still his hands, his feet, his eyes, his attitude will convey deception.

The Vatican is like a huge kind of magician's club. The more you look into it the more awful it becomes. And they're laughing at us. That's when I get angry.

A lie has no leg, but a scandal has wings.

The hardest tumble a man can make is to fall over his own bluff.

Inauthenticity is endemic in American politics today. The political backrooms where I spent much of my career were just as benighted as my personal life, equally crowded with shadowy strangers and compromises, truths I hoped to deny. I lived not in one closet but in many.

But Bill Clinton had the good taste to lie about his sexual peccadillos. He had the honor and the decency to want to cover it up.

In a closed society where everybody's guilty, the only crime is getting caught. In a world of thieves, the only final sin is stupidity.

Covering up, so far as I can see, is often the accompaniment to far more truly shameful behaviour than stripping off.

Everybody has a little bit of Watergate in him.

False face must hide what the false heart doth know.

Nixon was the most dishonest individual I have ever met in my life. He lied to his wife, his family, his friends, his colleagues in the Congress, lifetime members of his own political party, the American people and the world.

Well, the truth is that a lot of people lie about their health, they lie about the finances, they lie about things at work, they lie about things.

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

Whenever there are great virtues, it's a sure sign something's wrong.