Joseph Heller Quotes

Nowadays those are rewarded who make right appear wrong.

To say 'we' and mean 'I' is one of the most recondite insults.

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

Hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue.

Always be sincere, even if you don't mean it.

Let us not foist this humbug on the world.

Politics has become beyond acceptable when it comes to humanity. People are just frozen in falsehood.

Life is a system of half-truths and lies, Opportunistic, convenient evasion.

What's so great about the truth? Try lying for a change, it's the currency of the world.

Truth is no man's slave - but lies - what magnificent servants they make.

Half of the people lie with their lips; the other half with their tears

To bring deserving things down by setting undeserving things up is one of its perverted delights; and there is no playing fast and loose with the truth, in any game, without growing the worse for it.

Customary use of artifice is the sign of a small mind, and it almost always happens that he who uses it to cover one spot uncovers himself in another.

Irony is the recourse of the weak-minded wimp, I think. I hate bands that deliver their songs with knowing smiles on their faces, so that if those songs fall flat they can say 'Ah well, we never really meant it anyway.' It's so dishonest.

In Hollywood people lie to each other and cheat each other and then go and play tennis. But I don't want to be a tennis player.

Bad faith likes discourse on friendship and loyalty.

I was living a complete lie. But unfortunately, guilt doesn't make you stop.

Hypocrisy can afford to be magnificent in its promises, for never intending to go beyond promise, it costs nothing.

An ounce of hypocrisy is worth a pound of ambition.

Politics is when you say you are going to do one thing while intending to do another. Then you do neither what you said nor what you intended.

There is nothing in the world more shameful than establishing one's self on lies and fables.

Hypocrisy is the outside of cynicism.

If the best man's faults were written on his forehead, he would draw his hat over his eyes.

All deception in the course of life is indeed nothing else but a lie reduced to practice, and falsehood passing from words into things.

Knavery and flattery are blood relations.