Stephen Sorensen

“Odysseus’ success depends as much on making people believe what is not true as on surprising them with the truth.”
― Sheila Murnaghan, Disguise and Recognition in the Odyssey

“Early Christian thinkers frequently employed the "deception of the devil" motif to explain God's activity in the defeat of evil. ...God fooled Satan into thinking Jesus was just another human being...”
― Darby Kathleen Ray, Deceiving the Devil: Atonement, Abuse, and Ransom

“There is a difference between being merely irrational and being self-deceptive, and one of the major problems of self-deception is to rigorously distinguish between the two.”
― Eric Funkhouser, Self-Deception

“The gods are given even greater license to lie and deceive. Apparently, they do not have the same degree of responsibility to their relatives and allies as humans do. Effective acts of lying and deception seem to be admired as tokens of one god's at least temporary ascendancy over another god.”
― Louise H. Pratt, Lying and Poetry from Homer to Pindar: Falsehood and Deception in Archaic Greek Poetics