Top 100 Quotes About Sham
#1. Children are a wonderful gift. They have an extraordinary capacity to see into the heart of things and to expose sham and humbug for what they are.
Desmond Tutu
#2. The editors are committed to nothing save this: to keep common sense as fast as they can, to belabor sham as agreeably as possible, to give civilized entertainment.
H.L. Mencken
#3. A man can deceive a woman by his sham attachment to her provided he does not have a real attachment elsewhere.
Jean De La Bruyere
#4. Nothing really succeeds which is not based on reality; sham, in a large sense, is never successful. In the life of the individual, as in the more comprehensive life of the State, pretension is nothing and power is everything.
Edwin Percy Whipple
#5. Is his manhood a sham? Does he love himself or hate himself? I don't think he knows. Or it changes minute to minute. Or the question is so implicit in everything he does that he can't get outside it to answer
Don DeLillo
#6. One may make their house a palace of sham, or they can make it a home, a refuge.
Mark Twain
#7. I still think people will find out that I'm really not very talented. I'm really not very good. It's all been a big sham.
Michelle Pfeiffer
#8. If you give me your attention, I will tell you what I am:
I'm a genuine philanthropist
all other kinds are sham.
Each little fault of temper and each social defect
In my erring fellow creatures, I endeavor to correct.
W.S. Gilbert
#9. O Zeus! why hast thou granted unto man clear signs to know the sham in gold, while on man's brow no brand is stamped whereby to gauge the villain's heart?
Euripides
#10. A superficial freedom to wander aimlessly here or there, to taste this or that, to make a choice of distractions, is simply a sham. It claims to be a freedom of "choice" when it has evaded the basic task of discovering who it is that chooses.
Thomas Merton
#11. All the fakeness just rolls right off them, maybe because the nonstop sales job of American life has instilled in them exceptionally high thresholds for sham, puff, spin, bullshit, and outright lies, in other words for advertising in all its forms.
Ben Fountain
#12. To-night, for the first time in my life, I saw through the hollowness, the sham, the silliness of the empty pageant in which I had always played. To-night,
Oscar Wilde
#13. I pastiche, I quote, I lie. Fake, forge, forage, fabricate, copy, borrow, transform, steal. I illusion. I'm a genuine deceiver, a shy sham artist.
Shawna Lemay
#14. Good luck is a sham. True success requires sacrifice.
Rick Riordan
#15. The Tibetan missionaries in their mood of bright confidence disconcerted the imperial governments by laughing the new movement into frustration. For a sham faith cannot stand ridicule.
Olaf Stapledon
#16. Behind this smile in my face
Lies the dark shadow of emptiness
Hiding from your eyes within my gaze
Concealed with sham happiness.
Alexia Chase
#17. At root fame is a sham. I'm not going to live forever and if I am I certainly need don't you to tell me that so that I will buy a car or a box of dried up crackers.
Nick Mancuso
#18. Organized religion is a sham and a crutch for weak-minded people who need strength in numbers. It tells people to go out and stick their noses in other people's business. I live by the golden rule: Treat others as you'd want them to treat you. The religious right wants to tell people how to live.
Jesse Ventura
#19. It recognizes no morality but a sham morality meant for deceit, no honor even among thieves and of a thievish sort, no force but physical force, no intellectual power but cunning, no disgrace but failure, no crime but stupidity.
Woodrow Wilson
#20. The worst thing about depression is how true your vision seems, like misery is the only correct perspective and everything you think when you're happy is a sham. I didn't even want to be happy anymore because I'd rather live in honest misery than fake bliss. I
Michelle Tea
#21. Making and faking love are entirely different. Lust is quick. Love is not. It is a more sustained, exhausting emotion even to sham!
Kavita Kane
#22. Normally the only decoration in there was on Sham Harga's vest and the food was good solid stuff for a cold morning, all calories and fat and protein and maybe a vitamin crying softly because it was all alone. Now
Terry Pratchett
#23. You can offer the ability to citizens to choose from one of the two parties and elect their leaders as much as you want. But "democracy" is an illusion - a sham - if the most significant acts taken by those leaders are kept concealed from the citizenry.
Glenn Greenwald
#24. All men naturally hate each other. We have used concupiscence as best we can to make it serve the common good, but this is mere sham and a false image of charity, for essentially it is just hate.
Blaise Pascal
#25. Watching a midforties Wonder Woman stumble backward into Hannah's net stack of Traveler magazines made me wonder if the very idea of Growing Up was a sham, the bus out of town you're so busy waiting for, you don't notice it never actually comes.
Marisha Pessl
#26. A forward critic often dupes us With sham quotations peri hupsos, And if we have not read Longinus, Will magisterially outshine us. Then, lest with Greek he over-run ye, Procure the book for love or money, Translated from Boileau's translation, And quote quotation on quotation.
Jonathan Swift
#27. Ethanol is, in its pure form, just as much of a sham as oil.
Rob Corddry
#28. Open avowal of dictatorship is much less dangerous than sham democracy. The first one can fight; sham democracy is insidious.
Wilhelm Reich
#30. Resignation, not mystic, not detached, but resignation open-eyed, conscious, and informed by love, is the only one of our feelings for which it is impossible to become a sham.
Joseph Conrad
#31. Sham marriages have been widespread; people have been allowed to settle in Britain without being able to speak English; and there have not been rules in place to stop migrants becoming a burden on the taxpayer. We are changing all of that.
Theresa May
#32. Our assessment of socio-economic worth is largely a sham. We scientists should not lend ourselves to it - though we routinely do. We should, instead, insist on applying the criterion of quality.
John Charles Polanyi
#34. Life. It's like a snow globe. From the outside it can look pretty, idyllic, calm. But in reality it's a sham. Look closely inside and you'll see everything is fake, plastic, very small and very, very meaningless. And then every now and again some bastard comes along and shakes the whole lot up.
Keith Nixon
#35. His whole life was a sham, a fairy tale. The truth hidden behind a wall of lies, each lie another brick in the wall until he probably couldn't see the truth anymore.
Shaun Jeffrey
#36. If economic power is centered outside national African boundaries, then political and military power in any real sense is also centered outside until, and unless, the masses of peasants and workers are mobilized to offer an alternative to the system of sham political independence. All
Walter Rodney
#37. A good deal of so-called atheism is itself, from my point of view, theologically significant. It is the working of God in history, and judgement upon the pious. An authentic prophet can be a radical critic of spurious piety, of sham spirituality.
James Luther Adams
#38. Sham idealists: the quite large number of people who profess ideals as a form of premium for other-life insurance, and are content to lay up slavery and destitution for their descendants so long as they are enabled to produce personal copybooks of elevated views at the gate of heaven.
John Wyndham
#39. Sham Harga had run a successful eatery for many years by always smiling, never extending credit, and realizing that most of his customers wanted meals properly balanced between the four food groups: sugar, starch, grease, and burnt crunchy bits.
Terry Pratchett
#40. Gays (homosexuals) usually bring up the argument about all the straight couples living in 'sham' marriages, but I see no point in dragging the Clintons into this
Ann Coulter
#41. Any sort of plain speaking is better than the nauseous sham good fellowship our democratic public men get up for shop use.
George Bernard Shaw
#42. To get into just those situations where sham virtues will not suffice, but rather where, as with the ropedancer on his rope, one either falls or stands
or gets down.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#43. It is the mark of our whole modern history that the masses are kept quiet with a fight. They are kept quiet by the fight because it is a sham-fight; thus most of us know by this time that the Party System has been popular only in the sense that a football match is popular.
G.K. Chesterton
#44. If our faith in God is not the veriest sham, it demands, and will produce, the abandonment sometimes, the subordination always, of eternal helps and material good.
Alexander MacLaren
#45. Donald Trump had a university. Well, the state attorney general decided that the Donald Trump University was an unlicensed sham. And I thought, you know you're at a bad university when your commencement speaker is Whitey Bulger.
David Letterman
#46. If you cannot learn to love real art, at least learn to hate sham art and reject it.
William Morris
#47. It is not surprising that more and more people are coming to the conclusion that the ballot box is no longer an instrument that will secure political solutions ... They can see that the parliamentary democracy we boast of is becoming a sham.
Tony Benn
#48. One should adopt only those situations in which is in no need of sham virtues, but rather, like the tight-rope dancer on his tight rope, in which one must either fall or stand - or escape
Friedrich Nietzsche
#49. I wondered at what point in space the silly, sham blue of the sky turned black.
Sylvia Plath
#50. It is the inefficiency and sham of ... our schools ... that save us from being dashed on the rocks of false doctrine instead of drifting down the midstream of mere ignorance.
George Bernard Shaw
#51. We do not have to dig deep into history to understand the reality. The examples of Saddam Hussain, who was executed after a sham trial and the case of Muammar Gaddafi, who killed after surrendering in broad daylight, have given enough factual reality to understand the painful truth.
Nilantha Ilangamuwa
#52. Does not the latent feeling that much of their striving is to no purpose tend to infuse large quantities of sham into men's work?
William Allingham
#53. He'd never had a sham wife before, but he was grateful this one wasn't of the hysterical variety. Perhaps
Joanna Shupe
#54. How many ills spring from adultery? First the supreme law that is violated, Nobility oft stain'd with bastardy, Inheritance of land falsely possessed, The husband scorn'd, wife sham'd, and babes unbless'd.
John Webster
#55. Noam Chomsky has a book, which I read for the first time when I was in Spain, called 'Fear of Democracy'. There is your answer. Fear of democracy. In Honduras, they had a sham democracy. It was run by elites, what was called a liberal democracy, but in reality was a false democracy.
Hugo Chavez
#56. Sham liberty will be proclaimed everywhere.
Nostradamus
#57. Don't waste time worrying about work/life balance, or looking for your best self, sham "secrets" or any other snake oil being pushed by sloppy hippies who have never built a business, let alone a bankroll, or you will wake up 20 years from now poor, pissed off and primed for a midlife crisis.
Ari Gold
#58. There is a lizard called the chameleon that, as you probably know, can change color instantly to blend into its surroundings. Besides being slimy and clod-blooded, Captain Sham resembled the chameleon in that he was chameleonic, a word means 'able to blend in with any situation.
Lemony Snicket
#59. I just starred at him like he was trying to sell me the Sham-wow and the Slapchop for only $19.99
Kevin Hearne
#60. Beauty is nature, ugliness is sham perception of fleshy eye lacerated with keenness for visual corporeal thrill.
Akshmala Sharma
#61. There is no religion without love,
and people may talk as much as
they like about their religion, but
if it does not teach them to be good
and kind to man and beast,
it is all a sham.
Anna Sewell
#62. What's a treaty? It's a piece of paper. An agreement means nothing in itself. It's the power to force others to comply with that agreement - that's all that counts. That's the sham of this whole thing."
- General Marsh
S.J. Kincaid
#63. Perhaps the Party was rotten under the surface, its cult of strenuousness and self-denial simply a sham concealing iniquity.
George Orwell
#64. Academic training in beauty is a sham. We have been so deceived, but so well deceived that we can scarcely get back even a shadow of the truth.
Pablo Picasso
#66. Could she learn to like this guy?
""It's nice to meet you." Kylie plastered a warm expression on her face. But she worried he could tell it was a sham.
"The pleasure is all mine," he said.
Kylie just smiled. He was completely right about that.
C.C. Hunter
#67. All people like to be praised as it boosts their self-esteem, keeps them motivated and happy but it also pushes them into the abyss of sham, which is propelled by hypocrisy and sycophancy.
Balroop Singh
#68. She crawled in front of the Baudelaires' guardian and bared her teeth at Captain Sham.
Lemony Snicket
#69. Though this marriage is a sham, what we share tonight will be real, my lady. I said I'd treat you wi' the same respect I'd show my own true bride, and I meant it. I'd no' be able to call myself a Scotsman if I let you walk across this threshold.
Pamela Clare
#70. We were like two performers in a play, but we were divided, we were not acting with one another. We had to endure it alone, we had to put up this show, this miserable, sham performance for the sake of all these people I did not know and did not want to see again.
Daphne Du Maurier
#71. It's my personal theory that only 27 percent of perceived confidence is actual confidence, and the rest is sham. The key is: If you can't tell the difference, there is no difference.
Laini Taylor
#72. So strong is the power of superstition that even though we know that we have been reverencing a sham, yet still we hesitate to admit the validity of our new-found convictions.
Edgar Rice Burroughs
#73. Life was a sham. Smoke and mirrors hid the dysfunctional lives all of us lived.
Tiffany King
#75. I'm going to start a lot of companies. These are not sham companies. These are great businesses.
Eric Lefkofsky
#76. Bearing sham and scoffing rude, in my place condemned He stood - Sealed my pardon with His blood: Hallelujah, what a Savior!
Philip Bliss
#77. What we want is to be real. Let us not appear to be more than we are. Don't let us put on any cant, any assumed humility, but let us be real; that is the delight of God. God wants us to be real men and women, and if we profess to be what we are not, God knows all about us. God hates sham.
Dwight L. Moody
#78. To an honest judge, the alleged convergence between religion and science is a shallow, empty, hollow, spin-doctored sham.
Richard Dawkins
#79. It is the favourite stratagem of our passions to sham a retreat, and to turn sharp round upon us at the moment we have made up our minds that the day is our own.
George Eliot
#80. That gimcrack little desk, probably sham antique Louis XIV. She had said something to him once about there being a secret drawer in it. Secret drawer! That would not fool the police long.
Agatha Christie
#81. If you're gonna write, for God in heaven's sake, try to get naked. Try to write the truth. Try to get underneath all the sham, all the excuses, all the lies that you've been told.
Harry Crews
#82. By now, the camouflage had become my skin. My friends wouldn't want to know. Who would want to know? I certainly didn't want to know. All I wanted was to hold my assumptions to the light, and to watch them sparkle in their facets, as all sham gemstones do.
Darin Strauss
#83. Why shouldn't I hate her? She did the worst thing to me that anyone can do to anyone else. Let them believe that they're loved and wanted and then show them that it's all a sham.
Agatha Christie
#84. What do you do when you discover your adult life is a sham?
Nathan Hill
#85. March is the month of expectation,
The things we do not know,
The Persons of Prognostication
Are coming now.
We try to sham becoming firmness,
But pompous joy
Betrays us, as his first betrothal
Betrays a boy.
Emily Dickinson
#86. [He] saw communism for the sham that it was
a bunch of brutes who seized power in the name of the people, only to repress the very people they claimed to champion.
Vince Flynn
#87. Here's champagne for our real friends, and real pain for our sham friends.
Mardy Grothe
#88. Sham Harga's coffee was like molten lead, but it had this in its favor: when you'd drunk it, there was this overwhelming feeling of relief that you'd got to the bottom of the cup.
Terry Pratchett
#89. It seemed to me that, no matter what endeavor I was involved in, I was to be something of a sham.
Peter David
#90. There were times, Sham felt, when the captains regretted there being only two types of limb they could lose to their obsessions.
China Mieville
#91. Do not, oh do not indulge such a wild idea that a newspaper might err! If so what have we to trust in this age of sham?
Lewis Carroll
#92. I think belief is like having the first Microsoft Windows - it's so rudimentary, in the human brainwork, it's so obviously a sham.
Rupert Everett
#93. Sex. It's the biggest sham of all. I mean, your whole life, all you ever hear is how you're supposed to save yourself for marriage. And how it's so special. And then you finally do it. And you're like, that's it? This is what everyone's been raving about?
Candace Bushnell
#94. Nothing is falser than people's preconceptions and ready-made opinions; nothing is sillier than their sham morality.
Petronius
#95. An able, disinterested, public-spirited press, with trained intelligence to know the right and courage to do it, can preserve that public virtue without which popular government is a sham and a mockery.
Joseph Pulitzer
#96. It's all a sham: I have seen, and I know firsthand, indeed from my own pen, how the organized Right has sabotaged not only journalism but also democracy and truth.
David Brock
#97. It all seemed a hollow sham now - that strict code, that conscientious virtue that condemned her to the sterile joys of pious women! No, no, she'd had enough of that; she wanted to live!
Emile Zola
#98. As a matter of practical necessity, socialist democracy may eventually turn out to be more of a sham than capitalist democracy ever was. In any case, that democracy will not mean increased personal freedom.
Joseph Alois Schumpeter
#99. The silence encompassing the feeling so juvenile, veiling everything but a sham smile.
Parul Agrawal
#100. Truth, schmuth," Captain Sham said. If you don't care about something, one way to demonstrate your feelings is to say the word and then repeat the word with the letters S-C-H-M replacing the real first letters. Somebody who didn't care about dentists, for instance, could say "Dentists, schmentists.
Lemony Snicket