“The art of lying and deception”

Michel de Montaigne, “On the vanity of words” (1580), trans. M.A. Screech. As found in How We Weep and Laugh at the Same Thing, a selection of Montaigne’s essays, no. 29 in the Penguin Little Black Classics series (2015).

Some rhetoricians can still convince spectators to discount the evidence of their eyes.