Dupes Quotes

It's not mere extremism that makes folks at the fringes so troubling; it's extremism wedded to false beliefs. Humans have long been dupes, easily gulled by rumors and flat-out lies.

PHRENOLOGY, n. The science of picking the pocket through the scalp. It consists in locating and exploiting the organ that one is a dupe with.

If hopes were dupes, fears may be liars.

The most mistrustful are often the greatest dupes.

Dishonesty is the raw material not of quacks only, but also in great part dupes.

Extraordinarily excessive sensuality it may be .. but it all comes down to the same thing in the end, and one means is surely as good as another, since the end obtained is always the same. In any case the exceptional, endlessly repeated, is no different than the banal; and unceasing recapitulation can add nothing, in the end, to the sum of experience. I am weary and hopeless three times the dupe. Why have you trained me in the shame of abominable sins?

The dupe of friendship, and the fool of love; have I not reason to hate and to despise myself? Indeed I do; and chiefly for not having hated and despised the world enough.

It is easy to become the dupe of a deferred purpose, of the promise the future can never keep, and I had fallen into the meanest type of self-deception in making myself believe that all this was in preparation for great things to come.

The human heart has so many crannies where vanity hides, so many holes where falsehood works, is so decked out with deceiving hypocrisy, that it often dupes itself.

It is necessary that the prince should know how to color his nature well, and how to be a hypocrite and dissembler. For men are so simple, and yield so much to immediate necessity, that the deceiver will never lack dupes.

Men are such dupes by choice, that he who would impose upon others never need be at a loss to find ready victims.

The surest way of making a dupe is to let your victim suppose you are his.

You think him to be your dupe; if he feigns to be so who is the greater dupe, he or you?

People would not long remain in social life if they were not the dupes of each other.

As to the deceit perpetrated upon women, let it pass, for, when love is in the way, men and women as a general rule dupe each other.

Suspicion has its dupes, as well as credulity.

The credulity of dupes is as inexhaustible as the invention of knaves.

Man, who wert once a despot and a slave, A dupe and a deceiver! a decay, A traveller from the cradle to the grave Through the dim night of this immortal day.

How fondly swindlers coddle their dupes! No mother is as caressing or thoughtful towards her adored child as a merchant in hypocrisy toward his milch-cow.

Man is the yokel par excellence, the booby unmatchable, the king dupe of the cosmos. He is chronically and unescapably deceived, not only by the other animals and by the delusive face of nature herself--by his incomparable talent for searching out and embracing what is false, and for overlooking and denying what is true.

[My father] had this quirky thing of not believing in gravity. And giving me a constant headache about that one. He would say if I showed any interest in gravity, I was becoming a dupe of the system. He could see indications I was beginning to believe in it.

PATRIOT, n. One to whom the interests of a part seem superior to those of the whole. The dupe of statesmen and the tool of conquerors.

Wisdom consists in rising superior both to madness and to common sense, and is lending oneself to the universal illusion without becoming its dupe.

There are science teachers who actually claim that they teach "a healthy skepticism." They do not. They teach a profound gullibility, and their dupes, trained not to think for themselves, will swallow any egregious rot, provided it is dressed up with long words and an affectation of objectivity to make it sound scientific.

Ignorance is an evil weed, which dictators may cultivate among their dupes, but which no democracy can afford among its citizens.

When the Gauls laid waste Rome, they found the senators clothed in their robes, and seated in stern tranquillity in their curule chairs; in this manner they suffered death without resistance or supplication. Such conduct was in them applauded as noble and magnanimous; in the hapless Indians it was reviled as both obstinate and sullen. How truly are we the dupes of show and circumstances! How different is virtue, clothed in purple and enthroned in state, from virtue, naked and destitute, and perishing obscurely in a wilderness.

The spirit of 1776 is not dead. It has only been slumbering. The body of the American people is substantially republican. But their virtuous feelings have been played on by some fact with more fiction; they have been the dupes of artful maneuvers, and made for a moment to be willing instruments in forging chains for themselves. But times and truth dissipated the delusion, and opened their eyes.

There is no nation on earth powerful enough to accomplish our overthrow. Our destruction, should it come at all, will be from anothe quarter. From the inattention of the people to the concerns of their government, from their carelessness and negligence. I must confess that I do apprehend some danger. I fear that they may place too implicit a confidence in their public servants and fail properly to scrutinize their conduct; that in this way they may be made the dupes of designing men and become the instruments of their own undoing.

America's universities are filled with economically ignorant haters of the free market, so university campuses have become major forums for union denunciations of such companies as Nike, Wal-mart, and others. Faculty and students claim to be concerned about 'social justice,' but they are simply being used as dupes by unions who are not at all concerned with justice of any sort. Rather, their main concern is increasing the coffers of union treasuries by driving non-union competitors from the market.

If often happens too, both in courts and in cabinets, that there are two things going on together,--a main plot and an under-plot; and he that understands only one of them will, in all probability, be the dupe of both. A mistress may rule a monarch, but some obscure favorite may rule the mistress.

The human comedy is always tragic, but since its ingredients are always the same - dupe, fox, straight, like burlesque skits - the repetition through the ages is comedy.

If Satan ever laughs, it must be at hypocrites; they are the greatest dupes he has.

A hypocrite despises those whom he deceives, but has no respect for himself. He would make a dupe of himself too, if he could.

When merciless ambition, or mad zeal, has led two hosts of dupes to battlefield, That, blind, they there may dig each other's graves, And call the sad work glory.

Perhaps it is better to wake up after all, even to suffer, rather than to remain a dupe to illusions all one's life.

A man is his own easiest dupe, for what he wishes to be true he generally believes to be true.

War is the gambling table of governments, and citizens the dupes of the game.

True love is mixed up with birdlike squabbles, in which the disputants wound each other to the quick; but a quarrel without animus is, on the contrary, apiece of flattery to the dupe's conceit.

The evils we experience flow from the excess of democracy. The people do not want virtue, but are the dupes of pretended patriots.

I expect we shall be told, that the Militia of the country is its natural bulwark, and would be at all times equal to the national defence...The facts, which from our own experience forbid a reliance of this kind, are too recent to permit us to be the dupes of such a suggestion.

We swim, day by day, on a river of delusions, and are effectually amused with houses and towns in the air, of which the men aboutus are dupes. But life is a sincerity.

We only make a dupe of the friend whose advice we ask, for we never tell him all; and it is usually what we have left unsaid that decides our conduct.

I love advertising because I love lying. I think spending your life trying to dupe innocent people out of hard-won earnings to buy useless, low-quality, misrepresented items and services is an excellent use of your energy.

Ratings agencies are highly conflicted, unimaginative dupes. They are blissfully unaware of adverse selection and moral hazard. Investors should never trust them.

The ancient gentleman who has seen the world, who is profoundly experienced, and much too deep to be the dupe of an age so shallow as this, is to be won by an admiring glance at the brilliancy of his knee-buckle; praise his very pigtail, and you may lead him by it.

It is admirable to die the victim of one's faith; it is sad to die the dupe of one's ambition.

Rogueries, absurdities and untruths were perpetrated upon the teachings of Jesus by a large band of dupes and importers led by Paul, the first great corrupter of the teaching of Jesus.

I did not go to the Supreme Court on behalf of a class of women. I wasn't pursuing any legal remedy to my unwanted pregnancy. I did not go to the federal courts for relief. I went to Sarah Weddington asking her if she knew how I could obtain an abortion. She and Linda Coffey said they didn't know where to get one. They lied to me just like I lied to them. Sarah already had an abortion. She knew where to get one. Sarah and Linda were just looking for somebody, anybody, to further their own agenda. I was their willing dupe. For this, I will forever be ashamed.

Evil always wins through the strength of its splendid dupes; and there has in all ages been a disastrous alliance between abnormal innocence and abnormal sin.

Turning, then, from this loathsome combination of church and state, and weeping over the follies of our fellow men, who yield themselves the willing dupes and drudges of these mountebanks, I consider reformation and redress as desperate, and abandon them to the Quixotism of more enthusiastic minds.