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# Weekend Words: Mask
- URL: https://hyperallergic.com/weekend-words-mask/
- Published: 2017-04-09T13:30:08.000Z
- Updated: 2025-11-24T16:27:32.000Z
- Description: "A mask of gold hides all deformities."
- Author: Weekend Editors
- Tags: Art, Weekend, Weekend Words, #wp, #wp-post, #image-position-hidden, #Import 2025-11-24 07:23 (2016, 2017, part 2)

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/51/f8/51f871d8-b6be-4a73-b958-0ca4fff0110a/content/images/hyperallergic-newspack-s3-amazonaws-com/uploads/2017/04/mask.jpg)

The latest distraction promoted by the Trump administration to draw attention from its breathtaking incompetence and cratering poll numbers is the claim from an alt-right website, as [reported](http://www.salon.com/2017/04/06/unmasking-of-susan-rice-a-perfect-case-study-of-new-pro-trump-propaganda-machine%5Fpartner/?ref=hyperallergic.com) in *Salon*, that “the ‘White House Counsel’s office identified \[Susan\] Rice as the person responsible for the unmasking’ of Trump officials caught in surveillance of foreign officials ‘after examining Rice’s document log requests.’”

> Money does not change men, it only unmasks them.  
>  
> **—Marie-Jeanne Riccoboni**

> You do not need to leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. Do not even listen, simply wait, be quiet, still and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked, it has no choice, it will roll in ecstasy at your feet.  
>  
> **—Franz Kafka**

> The closing years of life are like the end of a masquerade party when the masks are dropped.  
>  
> **—Arthur Schopenhauer**

> Masks beneath masks until suddenly the bare bloodless skull.  
>  
> **—Salman Rushdie, *The Satanic Verses***

> There is a quality even meaner than outright ugliness or disorder, and this meaner quality is the dishonest mask of pretended order, achieved by ignoring or suppressing the real order that is struggling to exist and to be served.  
>  
> **—Jane Jacobs**

> A mask tells us more than a face.  
>  
> **—Oscar Wilde**

> Man’s great misfortune is that he has no organ, no kind of eyelid or brake, to mask or block a thought, or all thought, when he wants to.  
>  
> **—Paul Valery**

> Celebrity is a mask that eats into the face. As soon as one is aware of being somebody, to be watched and listened to with extra interest, input ceases, and the performer goes blind and deaf in his overanimation. One can either see or be seen.  
>  
> **—John Updike, *Self-Consciousness: Memoirs***

> Dignity is a mask we wear to hide our ignorance.  
>  
> **—Elbert Hubbard**

> A mask of gold hides all deformities.  
>  
> **—Thomas Dekker**

> The painted veil, by those who were, called life,  
> Which mimicked, as with colours idly spread,  
> All men believed or hoped, is torn aside;  
> The loathsome mask has fallen, the man remains  
> Sceptreless, free, uncircumscribed, but man  
> Equal, unclassed, tribeless, and nationless,  
> Exempt from awe, worship, degree, the king  
> Over himself.  
>  
> **—Percy Bysshe Shelley, *Prometheus Unbound***

> The business of obscuring language is a mask behind which stands the much bigger business of plunder.  
>  
> **—Frantz Fanon**

> Thou know’st the mask of night is on my face,  
> Else would a maiden blush bepaint my cheek  
> For that which thou hast heard me speak tonight.  
>  
> **—William Shakespeare, *Romeo and Juliet***

> Love, love, love — all the wretched cant of it, masking egotism, lust, masochism, fantasy under a mythology of sentimental postures, a welter of self-induced miseries and joys, blinding and masking the essential personalities in the frozen gestures of courtship, in the kissing and the dating and the desire, the compliments and the quarrels which vivify its barrenness.  
>  
> **—Germaine Greer**

> It’s a terrible thing to be alone — yes it is — it is — but don’t lower your mask until you have another mask prepared beneath — as terrible as you like — but a mask.  
>  
> **—Katherine Mansfield**

> Love takes off masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.  
>  
> **—James Baldwin**

> No mask like open truth to cover lies,  
> As to go naked is the best disguise.  
>  
> **—William Congreve, *The Double Dealer***