Quotes About Cunning

Book smarts are nice like heelies are nice: They'll only get you so far, until you have to use your freaking feet. In fight-or-flight situations it's the street smarts that will get you out alive.

A bit lazy, perhaps. But crafty

Beautiful lies. That's what they needed. People were fools. It was going to be easy for me.

Wise son of a bitch, you're one of those sons of bitches with a vocabulary and you like to lay it around!

How clever of you, sir, to be rich rather than smart.

I'm mischievous, but I'm calculated.

the way an Ugnaught gets to be an old Ugnaught is by being smart.

I'm a snake. My skin is cold. I have no heart. I slither…looking for prey with the tip of my tongue. I swallow the people I care about whole. That's the kind of creature I am. Don't you remember?

dialectics, as a veteran communist explained . . . 'is the art and technique of always landing on your feet.

Some 300 years earlier, in Leviathan, Hobbes had anticipated precisely such a notion16 with his concept of 'force and fraud': the idea that violence and cunning constitute the primary, indeed the sole, instigators of outcomes. And that the only analgesic for 'continual fear, and the danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short' is to be found in the sanctuary of agreement. The formation of alliances with others.

C'est la vie. When I got ill, it hurt like hell. I bought a kidney with my credit card, then I got well. I keep Faust's secret still –the clever, cunning, callous bastard didn't have a soul to sell.

Happiness is the lucky pane of glass you carry in your head. It takes all your cunning just to hang on to it, and once it's smashed you have to move into a different sort of life.

A woman being never at a loss... the devil always sticks by them.

Better to mock the game than to play and lose.

Man wants to be the king o' the rabbits, he best wear a pair o' floppy ears.

I will teach them what it means to put a lion in a cage, Cersei thought.

Even now, long days later, the memory filled him with a bitter rage. All his life Tyrion had prided himself on his cunning, the only gift the gods had seen fit to give him, and yet this seven-times-damned she-wolf Catelyn Stark had outwitted him at every turn. The knowledge was more galling than the bare fact of his abduction.

I am not blind, nor deaf. I know you all believe me weak, frightened, feeble. Your father knew me better. Oberyn was ever the viper. Deadly, dangerous, unpredictable. No man dared tread on him. I was the grass. Pleasant, complaisant, sweet-smelling, swaying with every breeze. Who fears to walk upon the grass? But it is the grass that hides the viper from his enemies and shelters him until he strikes.

These old knights are more cunning than you think, or they would never have lived to see their first grey hair.

It is better to be seen as cruel than foolish.

Now I understand why King Stannis let the wildlings through the Wall. He means for us to eat them.

He has an old man's caution and a young man's ambition, and has never lacked for cunning.

The longer Cersei waits, the angrier she'll become, and anger makes her stupid. I much prefer angry and stupid to composed and cunning.

My brother has his sword, and I have my mind... ?Tyrion Lannister