Insincerity Quotes

That's what show business is--sincere insincerity. (Benny Hill)
The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns, as it were, instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink. View quote
George Orwell
Insincerity is always weakness; sincerity even in error is strength. View quote
George Henry Lewes
There are many justifications of silence; there can be none of insincerity. View quote
George Henry Lewes
I love to read the dedications of old books written in monarchies-for they invariably honor some (usually insignificant) knight or duke with fulsome words of sycophantic insincerity, praising him as the light of the universe (in hopes, no doubt, for a few ducats to support future work); this old practice makes me feel like such an honest and upright man, by comparison, when I put a positive spin, perhaps ever so slightly exaggerated, on a grant proposal. View quote
Stephen Jay Gould
Where the questions of religion are concerned people are guilty of every possible kind of insincerity and intellectual misdemeanor. View quote
Sigmund Freud
Marriage always demands the greatest understanding of the art of insincerity possible between two human beings. View quote
Vicki Baum
I am convinced that human life is filled with many pure, happy, serene examples of insincerity, truly splendid of their kind-of people deceiving one another without (strangely enough) any wounds being inflicted, of people who seem unaware even that they are deceiving one another. View quote
Osamu Dazai
I like the enthusiasm but not the insincerity of Los Angeles. View quote
Brenda Blethyn
This is the age of insincerity. The movies had the misfortune to come along in the twentieth century, and because they appeal to the masses there can be no sincerity in them. View quote
Lionel Barrymore
I remember that on one occasion Mossadegh swooned in the midst of a speech to our Parliament. When a hastily summoned doctor started to loosen his clothes, Mossadegh instantly revived enough to clap his hand over his wallet. The old hypocrite had not been unconscious at all; he was merely pretending in the hope of impressing his audience. I think this incident, observed by many, illustrates one of Mossadegh's cardinal characteristics- namely, his insincerity. (Muhammad Reza Pahlavi)
Truly it is a sad thing for a people, as for a man, to fall into Scepticism, into dilettantism, insincerity; not to know Sincerity when they see it. For this world, and for all worlds, what curse is so fatal? View quote
Thomas Carlyle
The basis of insincerity is the idealized image we hold of ourselves and wish to impose on others. View quote
Anaïs Nin
Is insincerity such a terrible thing? I think not. It is merely a method by which we can multiply our personalities. View quote
Oscar Wilde
Kindness and friendliness become aspects of personalized service or of public relations of big firms, rationalized to further the sale of something. With anonymous insincerity, the Successful Person thus makes an instrument of his own appearance and personality. View quote
C. Wright Mills
Every single instance of a friend's insincerity increases our dependence on the efficacy of money. View quote
William Shenstone
The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink. In our age there is no such thing as ‘keeping out of politics.' All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred, and schizophrenia. When the general atmosphere is bad, language must suffer. I should expect to find - this is a guess which I have not sufficient knowledge to verify - that the German, Russian and Italian languages have all deteriorated in the last ten or fifteen years, as a result of dictatorship. But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought. A bad usage can spread by tradition and imitation even among people who should and do know better. View quote
George Orwell
The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. View quote
George Orwell
To place Russian communism on the same moral level with Nazi fascism, because both are totalitarian, is, at best, superficial, in the worse case it is fascism. He who insists on this equality may be a democrat; in truth and in his heart, he is already a fascist, and will surely fight fascism with insincerity and appearance, but with complete hatred only communism. View quote
Thomas Mann
From what little was known about the subject, insincerity itself was regarded as another form of psychosis but one which was exceedingly rare. View quote
Raymond Smullyan
Moreover, there is this harm too, and one of vast extent, and touching men generally, that by insincerity and lying faith and truth are lost, which are the firmest bonds of human society, and, when they are lost, supreme confusion follows in life, so that men seem in nothing to differ from devils. (John Henry Newman)
The time is past when music was written for a handful of aesthetes. Today vast crowds of people have come face to face with serious music and are waiting with eager impatience. Composers, take heed of this...But this does not mean that you must pander to this audience. Pandering always has an element of insincerity about it and nothing good ever came of that. View quote
Sergei Prokofiev
The more and the more that he wrote, and the deeper and the deeper that he dived, Pierre saw the everlasting elusiveness of Truth; the universal lurking insincerity of even the greatest and purest written thoughts. Like knavish cards, the leaves of all great books were covertly packed. He was but packing one set the more; and that a very poor jaded set and pack indeed. So that there was nothing he more spurned, than his own aspirations; nothing he more abhorred than the loftiest part of himself. The brightest success, now seemed intolerable to him, since he so plainly saw, that the brightest success could not be the sole offspring of Merit; but of Merit for the one thousandth part, and nine hundred and ninety-nine combining and dovetailing accidents for the rest. View quote
Herman Melville
The nearer emotional life approaches to hysteria, to continual outward show, the less genuine it becomes. Feeling becomes equated with vehemence of expression, so that insincerity becomes permanent. View quote
Anthony Daniels (psychiatrist)
It is a mark of insincerity of purpose to spend one's time in looking for the sacred Emperor in the low-class tea-shops. View quote
Ernest Bramah