Harold Pinter Quotes

A Conservative Government is an organized hypocrisy.

Inauthenticity is endemic in American politics today. The political backrooms where I spent much of my career were just as benighted as my personal life, equally crowded with shadowy strangers and compromises, truths I hoped to deny. I lived not in one closet but in many.

Reagan and Bush... made the world safe for hypocrisy.

Indians mock their corrupt politicians relentlessly, but they regard their honest politicians with silent suspicion. The first thing they do when they hear of a supposedly 'clean' politician is to grin. It is a cliche that honest politicians in India tend to have dishonest sons, who collect money from people seeking an audience with Dad.

Samuel J. Tilden says we are a nation of thieves and rascals. If that is so he ought to be President.

A Fellow who has deserved to be hang'd by all Laws human and divine, for his Conduct in private Life, will spring up into an important Champion at the Head of a Party.

But Bill Clinton had the good taste to lie about his sexual peccadillos. He had the honor and the decency to want to cover it up.

Clinton's a schmuck.

Nowadays those are rewarded who make right appear wrong.

I detest politics, to be honest with you. It's a cesspool. And I don't think I would fare well in that cesspool because I don't believe in political correctness and I certainly don't believe in dishonesty.

An ounce of hypocrisy is worth a pound of ambition.

Whenever there are great virtues, it's a sure sign something's wrong.

There's a tendency, especially among revolutionaries, to only show the good side of yourself and then when you come to power, the bad side comes out.

Hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue.

You look at someone like Beyonce singing 'Single Ladies,' when we all know she's married. Some of it is just for entertainment.

I completely scorn the falsifying, the sanctimonious, the cheap and the shoddy.

When we have a Deputy Prime Minister who tells people not to drive cars but has two Jags himself, and where the Minister who tells people not to have two homes turns out to have nine himself no wonder the public believe politicians are hypocrites.

Because hypocrisy stinks in the nostrils one is likely to rate it as a more powerful agent for destruction than it is.

Let a man rise to power, and he has as many virtues as will furnish an epitaph. Let him fall from power, and he has more vices than the Prodigal Son.

Bill Clinton smoked Marijuana but he didn't inhale, he spent time with a woman but he didn't sleep with her, he received a draft notice but didn't read it. Why give him the White House; he won't use it.

To expect integrity or honesty in a politician is like trying to buy fish at a produce market.

We have a Sunday code and a weekday code. We preach good and practice evil. We clothe the wolf of our actions in the sheep's clothing of our beautiful phrases.

The cynical impudence with which the reformers have tried to manufacture an ideal statesman out of the late shady politician beats anything in novel-writing. They are making popular capital. They lie and maneuver just like candidates for office. The independents and reformers are as bad as the late lamented, and for the same reason. It pays.[

The whole thing stamps the President (Theodore Roosevelt) as unreliable, a faker, and a humbug. For years he has indulged in lofty sentiments, and violates them all for the sake of satisfying his petty spite.... Thank God, he can't fool all the people all the time, and this country is fast awakening to the real character of this bloody hero of Kettle Hill.

Governor [Myron] Herrick is not a bad man; he is simply weak. He is one of those men who can do dishonest things honestly.