Quotes About Scheming

Everything's an act. Everything's strategy.

I always like playing the bad guys. They have more fun!

What we get, instead, are characters keeping their heartless compulsions secret from those who love them; characters scheming to appear loving or to prove to themselves that what feels like love is really just disguised self-interest; or, at most, characters directing an abstract or spiritual love toward somebody profoundly repellent . . .

Where on earth do you get a rose in Elsinore in the middle of winter?" "Don't you want it?" She took the flower from him, kissed his cheek. No bristles. No beard. A clean-shaven man with a kind and amiable face. Scheming. She didn't doubt it. But he was a diplomat by training. It was only to be expected. And if he'd lacked those skills perhaps neither of them would have managed Old Hamlet's death, the marriage, the succession so easily.

We shall perish by guile just as we slew.

That man could hide behind a corkscrew he's so twisted.

Bobby Roode is the kind of guy who will stab anyone in the back to get what he wants.

witches, such as Jadis, "are not interested in things or people unless they can use them; they are terribly practical";

Who does she think she's kidding? As if I don't know why she's sucking up to me— Because I've got something she'd like to get her hands on. At least, she thinks I've got him.

Or maybe you are my own life scheming desperately to climb back in.

Plagueis extended his left hand to touch him on the crown of the head. "Then it is done. From this day forward, the truth of you, now and forever more, will be Sidious.

I don't like this war. I don't like the cold-blooded scheming at the beginning and the carnage at the end and the grumbling and the jealousies and the pettishness in the middle. I hate the lack of gallantry and grace; the self-seeking; the destruction of valuable people and things. I believe in danger and endeavor as a form of tempering but I reject it if this is the only shape it can take.

What devilish things we do when we try to be clever.

She's not sensual. She doesn't want affairs. It's just cold-blooded experiment on her part and the fun of stirring people up and setting them against each other. She dabbled in that too. She's the sort of woman who's never had a row with anyone in her life--but rows always happen where she is! She makes them happen. She's kind of female Iago. She must have drama. But she doesn't want to be involved herself. She's always outside pulling strings--looking on--enjoying it!

Ah, well, bad blood somewhere. Mind you, I like the rascal—but he's the kind who would murder his grandmother for a shilling or two quite cheerfully. No moral sense. Odd the way some people seem to be born without it.

Would-be Machiavellis, some long dead before the Florentine statesman himself ever lived, anticipate the historian's enquiries by booby-trapping evidence, laying false trails, and liquidating artifacts. (This might have been what Napoleon had in mind when he blew off the nose of the Sphinx. Or was it Mohammed Sa'im al-Dahr who did it, in 1378 A.D.? No one really knows.)

More often than not, I get cast as quite Machiavellian roles - it's something about my face; I'm quite shifty or something!

There are one hundred and ninety ways of being a bastard and Carne knew all of them.

Gabrielle turned to Colm. "These men will be of interest to you." Colm looked them over. "Why is that?" he asked. With her back to the infidels, she whispered, "They like to dig holes.

Don't think so much of your own Cunning, as to forget other Men's; a Cunning Man is overmatched by a cunning Man and a Half.

The cunningest dissimulation is when a man pretends to be caught in the traps others set for him; and a man is never so easily over-reached as when he is contriving to over-reach others.

To a crafty man, a crafty and an halfe.

In King's Landing, there are two sorts of people. The players and the pieces… Every man's a piece to start with, and every maid as well. Even some who think they are players." Petyr Baelish

No fox is foxier than man!