Betrayal quotes
519 quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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Browse quotes that often appear alongside betrayal — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
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"You can't build a plot out of jokes. You need tragic relief. And you need to let people know that when a lot of frightened people are running around with edged weaponry, there are deaths. Stupid deaths, usually. I'm not writing 'The A-Team' - if there's a fight going on, people will get hurt. Not letting this happen would be a betrayal."
"The only way I've been able to survive the betrayal of lovers, family members, and society is to be able to create as an artist."
"I am not unaware that leaders betray, and sell out, and play false."
"Every betrayal contains a perfect moment, a coin stamped heads or tails with salvation on the other side."
"I would never betray a friend to serve a cause. Never reject a friend to help an institution. Great nations may fall in ruin before I would sell a friend to save them."
"I used to advertise my loyalty and I don't believe there is a single person I loved that I didn't eventually betray."
"He who loves his enemies betrays his friends; this surely is not what Jesus meant."
"Intolerance betrays want of faith in one's cause."
"He would stab his best friend for the sake of writing an epigraph on his tombstone."
"We are much harder on people who betray us in small ways than on people who betray others in great ones."
"A time comes when silence is betrayal. That time has come for us in relation to Vietnam. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift, is approaching spiritual death.I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money like some demonic destructive suction tube. So I was increasingly compelled to see the war as an enemy of the poor."
"No soul of high estate can take pleasure in slander. It betrays a weakness."
"Action is transitory, a step, a blow, The motion of a muscle, this way or that, 'Tis done--And in the after-vacancy, We wonder at ourselves, like men betrayed."
"Even loss and betrayal can bring us awakening."
"No failure in America, whether of love or money, is ever simple; it is always a kind of betrayal, of a mass of shadowy, shared hopes."
"Anyone who's never experienced the pleasure of betrayal doesn't know what pleasure is."
"O woman, born first to believe us; Yea, also born first to forget; Born first to betray and deceive us, Yet first to repent and regret."
"Until that time, her betrayals had filled her with excitement and joy, because they opened up new paths to new adventures of betrayal. But what if the paths came to an end? One could betray one's parents, husband, country, love, but when parents, husband, country, and love were gone - what was left to betray?"
"Not to transmit an experience is to betray it."
"Affairs are loaded with romanticism, morality, mythology, and intense emotions. They're not really about sex, but about pain and fear and the desire to feel alive. They're also about betrayal."
