Forgery Quotes

“To an untrained eye, need and love were as easily mistaken for each other as the real master's painting and a forgery.”
― Deb Caletti, Honey, Baby, Sweetheart

“The temporary alliance between the elite and the mob rested largely on this genuine delight with which the former watched the latter destroy respectability. This could be achieved when the German steel barons were forced to deal with and to receive socially Hitler's the housepainter and self-admitted former derelict, as it could be with the crude and vulgar forgeries perpetrated by the totalitarian movements in all fields of intellectual life, insofar as they gathered all the subterranean, nonrespectable elements of European history into one consistent picture. From this viewpoint it was rather gratifying to see that Bolshevism and Nazism began even to eliminate those sources of their own ideologies which had already won some recognition in academic or other official quarters. Not Marx's dialectical materialism, but the conspiracy of 300 families; not the pompous scientificality of Gobineau and Chamberlain, but the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion"; not the traceable influence of the Catholic Church and the role played by anti-clericalism in Latin countries, but the backstairs literature about the Jesuits and the Freemasons became the inspiration for the rewriters of history. The object of the most varied and variable constructions was always to reveal history as a joke, to demonstrate a sphere of secret influences of which the visible, traceable, and known historical reality was only the outward façade erected explicitly to fool the people.

To this aversion of the intellectual elite for official historiography, to its conviction that history, which was a forgery anyway, might as well be the playground of crackpots, must be added the terrible, demoralizing fascination in the possibility that gigantic lies and monstrous falsehoods can eventually be established as unquestioned facts, that man may be free to change his own past at will, and that the difference between truth and falsehood may cease to be objective and become a mere matter of power and cleverness, of pressure and infinite repetition. Not Stalin’s and Hitler's skill in the art of lying but the fact that they were able to organize the masses into a collective unit to back up their lies with impressive magnificence, exerted the fascination. Simple forgeries from the viewpoint of scholarship appeared to receive the sanction of history itself when the whole marching reality of the movements stood behind them and pretended to draw from them the necessary inspiration for action.”
― Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism

“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

“The forger was too exacting, too superficial. Only the real artist has the false beginning.”
― Dominic Smith, The Last Painting of Sara de Vos

“In other words, if a patent forgery like the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion" is believed by so many people that it can become the text of a whole political movement, the task of the historian is no longer to discover a forgery. Certainly it is not to invent explanations which dismiss the chief political and historical facts of the matter: that the forgery is being believed. This fact is more important than the (historically speaking, secondary) circumstance that it is a forgery.”
― Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism

“Everything that glitters more than gold is not gold.”
― Raheel Farooq

“The sentiments attributed to Christ are in the Old Testament. They were familiar in the Jewish schools and to all the Pharisees, long before the time of Christ, as they were familiar in all the civilizations of the earth — Egyptian, Babylonian, and Persian, Greek, and Hindu.”
― Joseph McCabe, The Sources of the Morality of the Gospels

“An artist does things naturally, without effort. Some power guides his hand. A forger struggles, and if he succeeds, it is a genuine achievement.”
― Patricia Highsmith, Ripley Under Ground

“Forgery, being the weirdest form of creativity there is, like antiques, costs lives. Why is it that antiques demand sacrificial victims? Dunno, but if they don't get enough, forgery does. You want proof? Here it is: Once a faker's found out, he dies. Truly. It always happens.”
― Jonathan Gash, Jade Woman

“Some of the most faked things are a signature, love, a smile, happiness, an orgasm, intelligence, and good skin.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“In Nigeria, if you live long enough, you will see your heroes turn to villains. Nobody is totally sane till the end; almost everyone can be bought at the right price.”
― Olawale Daniel

“You had no right." Oh, yes, he did. He suggested,

"Why don't you write that down. Put it in my handwriting. Perhaps I'll chance to read it, think I wrote it: Maybe then I'll believe you.”
― Judith Ivory, Untie My Heart

“But the lie often repeated becomes history, and the snake-oil pitchman's forgery of yore becomes the inspirational gospel of a posterity that sees itself as worldly and wise.”
― Nick Tosches, King of the Jews

“Forgeries of the truth handily outnumber all of the forgeries of men combined.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough

“Continuo a vender alguns quadros através da galeria de Nice, é certo, mas tenho sempre dificuldade em desfazer-me das telas e sobretudo àquele preço exploratório… mas enfim, um quadro tem de seguir a sua viagem! Talvez os volte a encontrar. Quanto ao meu futuro? A verdade é que não sei o que quero fazer a partir de agora…”
― Rui Carruço

“Mankind cannot manufacture hope. Rather, it creates an innumerable array of ingeniously crafted facsimiles that are quite captivating. And it is Christmas that answers the question of what all of these facsimiles were attempting to replicate, and it is Christmas that illustrates how badly mankind has failed in the attempt.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough

“In Nigeria, if you live long enough, you will see your heroes turn into villains. Nobody is totally sane till the end; almost everyone can be bought at the right price.”
― Olawale Daniel

“A lie is a forgery of a truth that is too big to embrace because of a prejudice that we’re too afraid to confront.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough

“Herbert Allen Jr. had convinced himself that appearances were important. Having calculated incorrectly around the first of the year that the press coverage would (as Ray Stark had put it) “blow over in two weeks,” Herbert and most of Columbia's boardroom directors (the majority who blindly aligned their interests behind Herbert's and Stark's; Resulting in facilitating their David Begelman debacle) eventually had seized upon a new and equally superficial appraisal of their dilemma: We have a PR problem. The solution? Obvious. Hire a public relations firm. Columbia Pictures already employed a capable public relations director, Jean Vagnini, whose work was considered excellent by objective observers outside the company, as well as many inside. The board of directors, however, had lost confidence in Vagnini's ability to handle the continuing media onslaught alone. They also suspected that Vagnini's loyalty, in the continuing animosity between Alan Hirschfield (Columbia's CEO), and the board, was to Hirschfield -- the lone voice of reason throughout the board's mishandling of Begeleman's check forgeries. Since she was young, relatively inexperienced, and female, she was a convenient target for a group of men who did not want to confront the true source of the "PR" problem—themselves and their own actions.”
― David McClintick, Indecent Exposure: A True Story of Hollywood and Wall Street

“AI art is just fancy knockoff.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Azad Earth Army: When The World Cries Blood