Deniability Quotes

He harbored a hidden inclination toward poetry but in the hard boiled world of adjusting, reading a sonnet seemed like something that could get a guy killed. It was perfect, Ben had told him. Like a book with a compartment cut out of the pages to hide a flask of whiskey, this one also let a guy hide a secret vice: the cover was bound upside down. So he could read the book, and if anyone saw him, it would look like he was posing.

Plausible deniability. ~ Will Willingham

If you can deny your talents, if you can conceal them from others or, even better, persuade yourself that they weren't even given to you, you're off the hook.

And being off the hook is a key element of the industrialized school's promise. It lets parents off the hook, certainly, since the institution takes over the teaching. It lets teachers off the hook, since the curriculum is preordained and the results are tested. And it lets students off the hook, because the road is clearly marked and the map is handed to everyone.

If you stay on the path, do your college applications through the guidance office and your job hunting at the placement office, the future is not your fault.

That's the refrain we hear often from frustrated job seekers, frustrated workers with stuck careers, and frustrated students in too much debt. 'I did what they told me to do and now I'm stuck and it's not my fault.'

What they've exchanged for that deniability is their dreams, their chance for greatness. To go off the path is to claim responsibility for what happens next. ~ Seth Godin

People must be right sometimes, must feel good sometimes, or we'd never have a herd. They would just give up. The occasional rightness fosters false confidence, reinforcing the crowd's wisdom. It is plausible deniability for TGH. It is how TGH repeatedly sucks the crowd in, makes them ignore negatives, then doles out maximum pain and suffering. ~ Kenneth L. Fisher

Americans are addicted to plausible deniability. If we can't even think critically about something as relatively insignificant as an internet cat or admit that a person might give a pet an offensive name or apologize honestly for small, careless slights, how are we ever going to reckon with the fact that our country was built by slaves on land stolen from people on whom we perpetrated a genocide? What the f*ck are we going to do? Our propensity for always, always, always choosing what is comfortable over what is right helped pave the road to this low and surreal moment in US history. ~ Lindy West

She had s feeling the adults were going to let the kids do whatever they could think of short of murder and mayhem.She remembered a term from a program she had seen on television: plausible deniability. This way, if things went wrong somehow, the adults could all say they hadn't known about any of it. ~ Stephanie S. Tolan

The important thing is that we maintain plausible deniability. ~ Richard M. Nixon

You see, sometimes when you work by yourself in a field such as ours, it helps to share knowledge among professionals. I'm not saying that we watch one another's back or anything, because we don't. It's more of a back-scratching than a back-watching affair, as in, "You scratch my back, and I'll scratch yours." Officially, none of us has ever heard of any of us. ~ Cherie Priest

It's called obfuscation in the interest of deniability. You might say it's our lingua franca. ~ Robert Ludlum

Mrs. Ishida smirked at the other parents. "Told you she could see demons." Ayden gaped.
"You knew?"
"Duh," Mr. Ishida snorted.
"Why does no one say anything?" I said.
"Plausible deniability," they all chorused. "Oh."
A & E Kirk (2014-05-26). Drop Dead Demons: The Divinicus Nex Chronicles: Book 2 (Divinicus Nex Chronicles series) (p. 510). A&E Kirk. Kindle Edition. ~ A&E Kirk

We use committees for all the ulterior purposes for which they might have been designed: diffusion of executive responsibility, plausible deniability, misdirection, providing the appearance of activity without the substance, and protecting the guilty. ~ Charles Stross

The true purpose of the various directives, regulations, and pocket-sized codes of conduct handed out to troops was not to implement genuine safeguards for noncombatants, but to give the military a paper trail of plausible deniability. ~ Nick Turse

If it be not destiny, then surely there is plausible deniability, which in the parlance of politics is the same thing. ~ Christopher Moore

We're instant ambassadors. Just add robot body and voila! If they'd told us anything real, they might have had to kill us. ~ Brenda Cooper

To great effect, Reagan echoed white frustration in race-neutral terms through implicit racial appeals. His 'color-blind' rhetoric on crime, welfare, taxes, and states' rights was clearly understood by white (and black) voters as having a racial dimension, though claims to that effect were impossible to prove. The absence of explicitly racist rhetoric afforded the racial nature of his coded appeals a certain plausible deniability. For example, when Reagan kicked off his presidential campaign at the annual Neshoba County Fair near Philadelphia, Mississippi - the town where three civil rights activists were murdered in 1964 - he assured the crowd 'I believe in states' rights,' and promised to restore to states and local governments the power that properly belonged to them. His critics promptly alleged that he was signaling a racial message to his audience, suggesting allegiance with those who resisted desegregation, but Reagan firmly denied it, forcing liberals into a position that would soon become familiar - arguing that something is racist but finding it impossible to prove in the absence of explicitly racist language. ~ Michelle Alexander

My lady,
When in difficulty, remember the words of our mutual friend Stephen Armstrong: "You can always swim out of quicksand as long as you don't panic."
Or send for me, and I'll come throw you a rope.
-W. R.

Every time Phoebe had read those words- at least a dozen times since they'd left Eversby Priory- a giddy sensation rushed through her. It had hardly escaped her notice that West had marked sections of the book with x's, just as she had marked Henry's book so long ago. A sly bit of flirtation, those x's- she was welcome to interpret them as kisses, while he could still maintain deniability.
Infuriating, complicated man. ~ Lisa Kleypas

No one talked about the questions, because talking ruined plausible deniability. Talking burst the bubble of innocence. Talking ended the happily ever after. These were the truths they believed. And they were lies. They should have talked while there was still something to say. ~ Courtney C. Stevens