Quotes About Cunning

what can you do against the lunatic who is more intelligent than yourself?

The girl from the fiction department… was looking at him [Winston]… She was very young, he thought, she still expected something from life… She would not accept it as a law of nature that the individual is always defeated… All you needed was luck and cunning and boldness. She did not understand that there was no such thing as happiness, that the only victory lay in the far future, long after you were dead.

This shrewd deceit taught me my first lesson in looking out for myself.

I figure it pays better to be smart and get by without working.

and don't take no shit from nobody, unless taking shit from them is part of your master plan to get the best of them by tricking them into being your friend.

If ultimately there was a tantalizing rectitude about her, she was none the less cunning: her exceeding gentleness, howbeit mitigated sometimes by the disturbing oppressiveness that foretells a storm in the air, left me utterly blind.

You have to be a smart player as well as a hard worker.

What's the best angle to cut someone's throat? Well, usually from behind. That's usually how it works.

It's not at all good when your cancer is 'palpable' from the outside. Especially when, as at this stage, they didn't even know where the primary source was. Carcinoma works cunningly from the inside out. Detection and treatment often work more slowly and gropingly, from the outside in.

When you want to fool the world, tell the truth.

I want my soldiers - I mean artists - to be young and strong, with tireless energy performing impossible feats of cunning and bravura.

'Tis no sin to cheat the devil.

I heard the clicking of hells, like the tapping of tiny hooves, and there appeared in front of me two, tiny withered crones. I thought I had to be dreaming still, for they were identical, dressed in the same dark red, with small, black, cunning eyes in their pale, wrinkled faces. They looked as if they put up their silvery-white hair in its coiled braids using each other as a mirror, and there were long, dangling earrings of marcasite and jet.

I'm a cat burglar.

It takes intelligence to act dumb.

If he had a bloody gash across his throat and a physiker was trying to sew it up, Lamora would steal the needle and thread and die laughing.

Nervy little Shades' Hill purse-clutcher, thinking you can keep me in the dark. What plan?" "The plan to steal a corpse." "Ahem. Anything else you'd like to tell me about it?" "It's brilliant.

I thought you specialised in dishonest finesse?" "I also do a brisk trade in putting knives to peoples' throats and shouting at them," said Locke.

Live snakes? ' said one of the scribes. 'You mean-' 'Yeah,' said Locke. 'They've got scales, they slither around - snakes. Keep up.

You seem to have a real talent for improvised dishonesty.

That sounds dangerous,'said Jean. 'For anyone else, maybe.For Gentlemen Bastards,we,it;s just what we do.' 'We?' 'We.

I have a rule of thumb—if you have a puzzle and the answers are elegant and simple, it means someone is trying to fuck you over.

La única persona capaz de acabar sin riesgo los juegos de Locke Lamora… —… es Locke… —… porque creemos que los dioses le libraron de una muerte terrible. Algo que tenía que ver con cuchillos y hierros al rojo… —… y cincuenta mil espectadores que aplaudían.

We don't believe in hard work when a false face and a good line of bullshit can do so much more