“There is nothing more deceptive than an obvious fact.”

The emotional qualities are antagonistic to clear reasoning.

Life is infinitely stranger than anything which the mind of man could invent.

There is nothing more stimulating than a case where everything goes against you.

The most difficult crime to track is the one which is purposeless.

A fool always finds a greater fool to admire him.

Where there is no imagination, there is no horror.

A man always finds it hard to realize that he may have finally lost a woman’s love, however badly he may have treated her.

Jealousy is a strange transformer of characters.

The most difficult crime to track is the one which is purposeless.

A fool always finds a greater fool to admire him.

Where there is no imagination, there is no horror.

A man always finds it hard to realize that he may have finally lost a woman’s love, however badly he may have treated her.

Jealousy is a strange transformer of characters.

So all life is a great chain, the nature of which is known whenever we are shown a link of it.

You have a grand gift for silence, Watson. It makes you quite invaluable as a companion.

It is more than possible; it is probable.

Compromise is the welcome mat to deception.

For as long as I care to remember, religion, like the striptease, has always been a display of the power of suggestion. Like the Virgin Birth, it has all too often supported an immaculate deception.

Better to be occasionally cheated than perpetually suspicious.

Ruthven surmised that he had hit upon some of the central deceptions which had wrecked him and reduced him and so many of his colleagues to this condition.

Deception is a sort of seduction. In love and war, adultery and espionage, deceit can only succeed if the deceived party is willing, in some way, to be deceived.

The broad outlines of the Double Cross deception have been known since 1972, when Sir John Masterman, the former chairman of the double agent committee, controversially published his account of the operation in defiance of official secrecy.

You know, your species [humans] has the most amazing capacity for self-deception, matched only by its ingenuity in trying to destroy itself.

What destroys us most effectively is not a malign fate but our own capacity for self-deception and for degrading our own best self.