Betrayal Quotes

‘Familial betrayal is, to me, the most heartbreaking kind – because if you can’t trust your family to love you and protect you, who can you really trust? – Alexandra Bracken’ – Alexandra Bracken

‘He that has eyes to see and ears to hear may convince himself that no mortal can keep a secret. If his lips are silent, he chatters with his fingertips; betrayal oozes out of him at every pore.’ – Sigmund Freud

‘Betrayal is the only truth that sticks.’ – Arthur Miller

‘Betrayal can be extremely painful, but it’s up to you how much that pain damages you permanently.’ – Emily V. Gordon

‘We have to distrust each other. It is our only defense against betrayal.’ – Tennessee Williams

‘The male, for all his bravado and exploration, is the loyal one, the one who generally feels love. The female is skilled at betrayal and torture and damnation.’ – Charles Bukowski

‘I have never known a more vulgar expression of betrayal and deceit.’ – Lucien Bouchard

‘Love is whatever you can still betray. Betrayal can only happen if you love.’ – John le Carre

‘I know the feeling of confusion and betrayal. I know the feeling of fearing for my life.’ – Jason Reynolds

‘Betrayal is one of my biggest fears. Betrayal happens on many different levels all the time, and there is no worse feeling than realizing someone you thought you could trust has gone against you.’ – Katie Lee

‘As pessimistic as I am about the nature of human beings and our capacity for atrocity and malevolence and betrayal and laziness and inertia, and all those things, I think we can transcend all that and set things straight.’ – Jordan Peterson

‘Betrayal does so many different things to people.’ – Trai Byers

‘Children know when they are being sold a sanitised version of the world, and I think that’s a betrayal of the relationship between author and reader.’ – Morris Gleitzman

‘You want to believe that there’s one relationship in life that’s beyond betrayal. A relationship that’s beyond that kind of hurt. And there isn’t.’ – Caleb Carr

‘Most of us regard good luck as our right, and bad luck as a betrayal of that right.’ – William Feather

‘Winning is not selling your soul. Winning is not betrayal. Winning is the means of applying your principles.’ – Liz Kendall

‘Anyone who hasn’t experienced the ecstasy of betrayal knows nothing about ecstasy at all.’ – Jean Genet

‘Is it possible to succeed without any act of betrayal?’ – Jean Renoir

‘Tragedy in life normally comes with betrayal and compromise, and trading on your integrity and not having dignity in life. That’s really where failure comes.’ – Tom Cochrane

‘There are two things in Indian history – one is the incredible optimism and potential of the place, and the other is the betrayal of that potential – for example, corruption. Those two strands intertwine through the whole of Indian history, and maybe not just Indian history.’ – Salman Rushdie

‘I could become very rich in Guatemala but by the low method of ratifying my title, opening a clinic, and specialising in allergies. To do that would be the most horrible betrayal of the two ‘I’s’ struggling inside me: the socialist and the traveller.’ – Che Guevara

‘It’s particularly hard to take being stabbed in the back close to home. There’s always a feeling of betrayal when people of your own group oppose you.’ – Catharine MacKinnon

‘The fear really hits you. That’s what you feel first. And then it’s the anger and frustration. Part of the problem is how little we understand about the ultimate betrayal of the body when it rebels against itself.’ – Charles Bronson

‘The problem is that everywhere the gas drilling industry goes, a trail of water contamination, air pollution, health concerns and betrayal of basic American civic and community values follows.’ – Josh Fox

‘The three touchstones that woke Buddha up – sickness, old age, and death – are a pretty good place to start when crafting a tragic tale. And if we need to get more specific: heartbreak, destruction, miscomprehension, natural disasters, betrayal, and the waste of human potential.’ – Paul Di Filippo

‘Women are upset if their partner has an intimate conversation of any kind with someone who isn’t them. They consider it a violation, a betrayal. Men should think this way, but they don’t.’ – Drew Pinsky

‘For me, I always wonder what’s worse: an emotional betrayal or a physical betrayal? That’s a really tough call.’ – Hilarie Burton

‘My plays are ultimately about love, honor, duty, betrayal.’ – August Wilson

‘Pursuing fame is the ultimate in people-pleasing and the ultimate betrayal of self.’ – Justine Bateman

‘Cheating tends to come up a lot in my songs. Betrayal fascinates me. I think the fact that you can trust someone so much and then they go against that has always plagued my writing for some reason.’ – Jade Bird

‘America once used the words ‘treason’ and ‘traitors’ only in cases of actual betrayal of our nation’s most vital secrets or interests.’ – Rick Wilson

‘We feel like ‘Lost’ deserved a real resolution, not a ‘snow globe, waking up in bed, it’s all been a dream, cut to black’ kind of ending. We thought that would be kind of a betrayal to an audience that’s been on this journey for six years. We thought that was not the right ending for our show.’ – Carlton Cuse

‘There are only really a few stories to tell in the end, and betrayal and the failure of love is one of those good stories to tell.’ – Sean Lennon

‘The Bible is very resonant. It has everything: creation, betrayal, lust, poetry, prophecy, sacrifice. All great things are in the Bible, and all great writers have drawn from it and more than people realise, whether Shakespeare, Herman Melville or Bob Dylan.’ – Patti Smith

‘Not to invent yourself is to be false. To follow preordained rules is a profound betrayal of what it means to be human.’ – David Starkey

‘Betrayal… is my favorite subject.’ – Norman Jewison

‘People are always fascinated by infidelity because, in the end – whether we’ve had direct experience or not – there’s part of you that knows there’s absolutely no more piercing betrayal. People are undone by it.’ – Junot Diaz

‘A betrayal in a family is much more devastating than a betrayal among friends, or even lovers.’ – Ari Aster

‘Naturally, when one makes progressive steps, there may be some who see it as a betrayal of their goals and interests.’ – Louis Farrakhan

”Under the Poppy’ is the love story of Istvan and Rupert, lovers and friends from childhood, who’ve been parted by jealousy – and a secret betrayal by Istvan’s sister, Decca, who also loves Rupert, with whom she runs the brothel called Under the Poppy, where the floozies cater to every taste from saucy to peculiar.’ – Kathe Koja

‘Film seems to be a medium designed for betrayal and violence.’ – Nick Cave

‘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.’ – Terry Pratchett

‘Empathy is not a betrayal of one’s cause.’ – Megan Phelps-Roper

‘When I’m doing a play like ‘Betrayal,’ I have to be careful not to get stimulation overload.’ – Zawe Ashton

‘Love is understood, in a historical way, as one of the great human vocations – but its counterspell has always been infidelity. This terrible, terrible betrayal that can tear apart not only another person, not only oneself, but whole families.’ – Junot Diaz

‘Within the pages of The Betrayal of America I prove that these justices were absolutely up to no good, and they deliberately set out to hand the election to George Bush.’ – Vincent Bugliosi

‘When marketers influence habits, they influence peoples’ self-identity. And so when a group or company does something that doesn’t correspond to our core values, it feels like a betrayal.’ – Charles Duhigg

‘I would never let somebody say that they’re me. That would be the ultimate betrayal of what I stand for.’ – Felicia Day

‘A lot of people have experienced a relationship betrayal, even if it was when they were 16 and with their first love.’ – Suranne Jones

‘Rather than writing about international events, I write about individual lives. There is elation and sadness, death and birth, love and jealousy, co-operation and betrayal. All the great emotional transactions that happen wherever people come together.’ – Tom Drury

‘I would not have stayed at a university if it told me upfront that a condition for me getting tenure. my views have to be filtered through Catholic values. I would consider it a betrayal of my parents’ legacy.’ – Norman Finkelstein

‘From Borges, those wonderful gaucho stories from which I learned that you can be specific as to a time and place and culture and still have the work resonate with the universal themes of love, honor, duty, betrayal, etc. From Amiri Baraka, I learned that all art is political, although I don’t write political plays.’ – August Wilson

‘Tales of power and ambition and intrigue and betrayal and desire – when you’re telling those in a big way, you automatically want to go to Shakespeare.’ – Beau Willimon

‘At base, the ugly meaning of collaborator carries an implication of treason: betrayal of one’s nation, of one’s ideology, of one’s morality, of one’s values.’ – Anne Applebaum

‘Hillary Clinton cannot run away from her own record of incompetence or from the Obama record of abject betrayal.’ – Tom Tancredo

‘Deep down, my mom had long suspected I was gay… Much of her anger and hurt came from her sense of betrayal that she was the last to be told.’ – Chaz Bono

‘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.’ – Greil Marcus

‘The issue of the Betrayal was so central to that, I felt the need to comment upon it. My choices were to ignore the games and put them ‘outside’ of continuity or to integrate them. I chose the latter.’ – Raymond E. Feist

‘When you’re out of sight for as long as I was, there’s a funny feeling of betrayal that comes over people when they see you again.’ – Esther Williams

‘You see that’s what I think is such a terrible, terrible betrayal, the trust that people have in government.’ – Ralph Steadman

‘Espionage, for the most part, involves finding a person who knows something or has something that you can induce them secretly to give to you. That almost always involves a betrayal of trust.’ – Aldrich Ames

‘Let’s say a Soviet exchange student back in the ’70s would go back and tell the KGB about people and places and things that he’d seen and done and been involved with. This is not really espionage; there’s no betrayal of trust.’ – Aldrich Ames

‘The betrayal of trust carries a heavy taboo.’ – Aldrich Ames

‘And I think within the pages of The Betrayal of America I think I present an overwhelming case that these five justices were up to no good, and they deliberately set out to hand the election to George Bush.’ – Vincent Bugliosi

‘A national legal organization is giving very serious thought to using The Betrayal of America as a legal basis for asking the House Judiciary Committee to institute impeachment proceedings against these five justices.’ – Vincent Bugliosi

‘When I was 15, I made a solo record. It made Artie very unhappy. He looked upon it as something of a betrayal.’ – Paul Simon

‘Part of the problem is how little we understand about the ultimate betrayal of the body when it rebels against itself. You always worry about charlatans. We found that specialists did not know as much as we thought.’ – Charles Bronson

‘Poor people and working people have not been the focus of the Obama administration. That for me is not just a disappointment but a kind of betrayal.’ – Cornel West

‘Muhammad is more human, more self-doubting, even self-tortured at times. His story is full of adventure, intrigue, betrayal.’ – Deepak Chopra

‘Universities are no longer educational in any sense of the word that Rousseau would have recognised. Instead, they have become unabashed instruments of capital. Confronted with this squalid betrayal, one imagines he would have felt sick and oppressed.’ – Terry Eagleton

‘For me, fiscal realism is not a betrayal of Labour values; it is the foundation by which we win the trust of the public.’ – Douglas Alexander

”Anna Karenina’ is just a story about a woman falling in love with a bloke who is not her husband. It’s gossip, rubbish – on the other hand, it’s the deepest story there could be about social transgression, about love, betrayal, duty, children.’ – Hanif Kureishi

‘For too long, musicians have been the greatest enemy of music. Their lack of desire to proselytize is a kind of betrayal.’ – Charles Hazlewood

‘What public health really is is a trust. That’s why I used the term ‘Betrayal of Trust’ as the title of my book. It’s a trust between the government and the people.’ – Laurie Garrett

‘My mom and dad passed away from cancer. Within nine months, I lost both of my folks. Immediately after that, I had a horrible betrayal where my brother, who worked for me, stole a lot of my money. He’s in jail now.’ – Dane Cook

‘I go to movies expecting to have a whole experience. If I want a movie that doesn’t end, I’ll go to a French movie. That’s a betrayal of trust to me. A movie has to be complete within itself; it can’t just build off the first one or play variations.’ – Joss Whedon

‘Love and marriage are wonderful arenas in which to place a character. We are most likely to risk our morals and beliefs while in love. Betrayal gives tremendous insights into a character as well.’ – Anita Shreve

‘In the kind of New England I’m from, you are expected to stay and marry somebody from New England – well, Maine, actually – so I think it was seen as a betrayal when I left for New York, which has been my refuge.’ – Elizabeth Strout

”California Bones’ is the first volume in my trilogy about Daniel Blackland, a wizard trying to survive in a world that eats wizards. It’s a book about friends and family, trust and betrayal, the love of power and the power of love.’ – Greg van Eekhout

‘I find it difficult to believe that Redditors don’t understand that anonymity online is merely a facade; indeed, it’s probably one of the reasons that revealing the identity of pseudonymous Redditors is looked on as such a huge betrayal.’ – John Scalzi

‘Living in France while the Falklands War was going on, I felt a profound sense of shame and betrayal, just as I did by the war in Iraq. People have asked why I don’t talk about that directly in my plays. Well, politics needs to be articulated in many different ways.’ – Simon McBurney

‘Atari collapsed in ’84, and I went freelance, and that was when I started spreading out and doing my own thing. I really cut loose and did a game called ‘Trust and Betrayal’, which was the first game solely about interpersonal relationships.’ – Chris Crawford

‘The House of Lords has many fine aspects, but at its heart, it is a betrayal of the core democratic principle that those in the enlightened world hold so dear – that those who make the laws of the land should be elected by those who must obey those laws.’ – Charles Kennedy

‘The history of Israel-Palestine conflict cannot be understood without its underlying emotional meanders. The emotional frameworks of the loss of Palestine for the Arab-Islamic world touched deep scars that go back to the Crusades, symbolizing a proof of Arab-Islamic decay, political impotence, and perceived (British/French) betrayal and antagonism.’ – Nayef Al-Rodhan

‘Slavery was the betrayal of the American Promise at the moment that promise was made.’ – Steve Erickson

‘In ‘Se7en’ and ‘Fight Club,’ Fincher proved his suave mastery of film violence; in Zodiac, his way of clarifying the many clues in a murder thriller. As he showed in ‘The Social Network,’ the director also knows that no wound is more toxic than a friend’s betrayal.’ – Richard Corliss

‘Standing athwart ineffective, feel-good legislation shouting, ‘Stop!’ is seen as a betrayal of those struggling to get their footing on the lowest rung of the economic ladder. Yet raising the minimum wage hacks the lowest rungs off the ladder altogether. But economic logic doesn’t wash with liberals who are intent on inflaming class warfare.’ – Angela McGlowan

‘When one is the type of writer who cares about the meaning of the historically specific setting, the history itself is not something that I would call backdrop. It’s not window dressing for a timeless relationship about love and betrayal. For me, the setting and the specific history are active co-agents with me in trying to form the novel.’ – Rachel Kushner

‘I was told that, when ‘Betrayal’ was being produced by one of the provincial companies in England, the two actors playing those roles actually went into a pub one day and played that scene as if it were really happening to them. The people around them became very uncomfortable.’ – Harold Pinter

”Game of Thrones,’ people say that it’s a fantasy series, but it’s a hell of a lot more than that. It attracts the so-called geeks and nerds, and God bless them, they’re wonderful for getting right into the show. But primarily it’s about family; it’s power and betrayal and jealousy. It’s all those wonderful things that a fantastic drama is about.’ – Liam Cunningham

‘Of course, when you’re a parent, that’s your paramount concern, for your children, and there were some very credible and frightening threats, and the agency declined to provide any security, and it felt like a betrayal all over again. It was really painful.’ – Valerie Plame

‘With the single parent model, you experience betrayal differently. You experience lying from your kids differently.’ – Rosemarie DeWitt

‘If you’ve had a marriage that ended because of a betrayal in trust on your spouse’s behalf, the idea of trusting another person with your heart can seem completely ridiculous.’ – Emily V. Gordon

‘I think Le Carre is a great modernist writer, which is to say, in a godless world, he invokes deep, almost religious ideas of betrayal, trust, faith, and that’s why we love it.’ – David Farr

‘I dispute that ‘Closer’ is about betrayal. Betrayal is one of the elements.’ – Patrick Marber

‘There’s a lot of stupid men out there who feel like makeup is a betrayal of the truth, and that is so funny to me.’ – Katya Zamolodchikova

‘I once had a ‘best friend’ share private stories that I had told her in confidence to another mutual friend. I think the worst part, aside from the actual betrayal of trust, is that this experience affected my future relationships, as I was hesitant to be as open with my other friends.’ – Katie Lee

‘I stand on the black side of issues, philosophically, politically, socially, and for me to not check that box, I felt like, would be some sort of betrayal of not only who I am but also the community I affiliate with.’ – Rachel Dolezal

‘When somebody says that a comic steals jokes, it’s the ultimate betrayal of comedy.’ – Carlos Mencia

‘The greatest betrayal of the liberal left in this country is by the Labour party.’ – Anna Soubry

‘The death of Yemeni strongman Ali Abdullah Saleh shows that Saudi Arabia is paying for its betrayal of the Arab spring in Yemen in 2011.’ – Jamal Khashoggi

‘The Aadhar data that was leaked to American companies was, in a way, a betrayal to the country.’ – Subramanian Swamy

‘I like to shoot feature films because it’s about capturing emotions… words like guilt, hurt, betrayal.’ – Rajiv Menon

‘Each project you do demands a different diet in a way. Because there’s so much tension in ‘Betrayal,’ so much holding of breath and emotion, I can’t get too happy in my food choices or I can’t get alert enough.’ – Zawe Ashton

‘My position on democracy is really clear. Any attempt to overthrow the country is a betrayal to our unity and is treason.’ – Fethullah Gulen

‘Woman to woman, I shared a connection with Omarosa as a friend and a campaign sister, and I am absolutely shocked and saddened by her betrayal and violation on a deeply personal level.’ – Lara Trump

‘In ‘A Scanner Darkly,’ as in ‘The Spy Who Came in from the Cold,’ all intersubjective relations devolve into webs of suspicion and betrayal.’ – Mark Fisher

‘De Palma’s great theme, obsessively reiterated, is betrayal.’ – Mark Fisher

‘The allegations surrounding whether President Trump pressured the Ukrainian leader to investigate the family of his political rival is, if true, a disgraceful betrayal of the oath of office and demands immediate action by Congress.’ – Amy McGrath

‘One of the most depressing aspects of the whole Brexit debate has been the rush to instant judgment about the motives of MPs and others and the readiness to accuse others of treachery or betrayal.’ – Nicky Morgan

‘To give the personal details of Ukrainians to the Russian authorities would not only be against the law, but also a betrayal of those millions of people in Ukraine who trusted us.’ – Pavel Durov

‘Labour should have fought with every sinew in 2010 to retain power. To give up power voluntarily because you are tired of government and it is all too difficult is a betrayal of the people you serve.’ – Andrew Adonis, Baron Adonis

‘To say that the U.K. could have no part to play in improving a justice system different to our own, but which was seeking advice on how to deliver more internationally compliant standards, was a betrayal of our international humanitarian duty.’ – Crispin Blunt

‘When we feed people, we should only feed them healthy food. They go to the government because they don’t have any other choices. So it’s almost a betrayal when you know someone has no other choice but to eat what you give them, and you’re giving them food that feeds their chronic diseases.’ – Eric Adams

‘If Sarri went to Juve for us Neapolitans it would surely be a betrayal.’ – Lorenzo Insigne

‘Evidence has proven that Secretary Mayorkas’ sustained and willful betrayal of the public trust makes him an accessory to the poisoning of millions of Americans complicit in a modern-day slave trade and so derelict in his duty to secure the homeland that it crosses unequivocally into the realm of high crimes and misdemeanors.’ – John E. James