Quotes About Cunning

Be that as it may, from Plato and Aristotle onward, the limits were set, and thought was channeled in socially acceptable directions. In particular, the distinction between theoretical thinking and technological activity was established. The words we still use today—machine, mechanical, engineer—have a similar meaning. They do not refer to rational knowledge but to cunning and expediency.

They were confident and cunning. They weren't mucking around looking for nuclear weapon secret sloppy seconds in America. They could care less about America. They were busy with the whole world domination thing.

He chuckled as he realized how he'd rationalized betrayal into gallantry. Damn, he was a good lawyer. But

Art is the final cunning of the human soul which would rather do anything than face the gods.

If in the revealing light of some moment of cataclysm you were to meet your double, not dressed in its worldly glad-rags, not armed with that buckler of excuses which conventional hypocrisy uses to cover our secret wishes, but in all its moral nakedness, showing its tendencies and urges, its pitiless cunning and its cowardice, are you certain that you would recognize it?

Luckily, the clever pets had managed to escape.

All is deceit. Nothing wears a true face or uses a true name. Nothing is as it appears to be, as if the whole universe were busily playing out a function, 'guised in cunning. The mad are sane, the blind can see, the sane are otherwise demented, good is evil, and up, for all I care, is down.

I may be dead, but I ain't stupid.

She could not know that he was a master manipulator. She could not know that he had plans for her. And she could not know that as the Duke of Blackheath strode out into the Grand Hall and called for his hat, his gloves, and his horse, his eyes were gleaming with cunning delight.

In the hands of a people whose education has been willfully neglected the ballot is a cunning swindle benefiting only the united barons of industry, trade, and property.

Sometimes a villain is very quiet - it makes them more deadly, more intellectual.

The English are good at bad guys - the James Bond-style villain, cunning, slow-burning. The Americans are much more obvious about it.

I always tried to play the bad guys as guys who didn't know they were bad guys. There are villains we run into all the time, but they don't think they are doing anything wrong. If they do, they think they are cunning and smart. When people break laws and ethical rules, they justify it in their own terms.

A tactful man can pull the stinger from a bee without getting stung.

They were cunning,deceitful,arrogant and nearly incomprehensible,especially the Anglos. They were dangerous because they hid their thoughts,hid their feelings behind a smiling face. Who could tell what was really going on in their heads? They said one thing and thought another. Who knew what rancid thing lived ,curled up,in the space between words and thoughts.

He was very clever, he gave the impression of being tolerant and kind, while actually being very dark, very cunning.

So that over time, clever became cunning. Dynamic became obsessed. Ambitious became ruthless.

We're used to the film versions of psychopaths. The clearly crazies. But most psychopaths are clever. They have to be. They know how to mimic human behavior. How to pretend to care, while not actually feeling anything except perhaps rage and an overwhelming and near-perpetual sense of entitlement. That they've been wronged. They get what they want mostly through manipulation.

So who was the fox?" "The cunning one who convinces the others that someone innocent is actually guilty. Blaming the victim.

A sneer is the weapon of the weak. Like other devil's weapons, it is always cunningly ready to our hand, and there is more poison in the handle than in the point.

Genius always gives its best at first prudence, at last.

I think Maurice is whatever he needs to be, whenever he needs to be it. He's an operator, that's for sure.

It's a wise conspirator that knows his own name.

After such knowledge, what forgiveness? Think now History has many cunning passages, contrived corridors And issues.