Cunning Quotes

The weak in courage is strong in cunning.

You can fool some of the people some of the time and some of the people all of the time. That’s usually enough.

Old age and treachery will always beat youth and exuberance.

Therefore, a prudent ruler ought not to keep faith when by so doing it would be against his interest, and when the reasons which made him bind himself no longer exist. If men were all good, this precept would not be a good one; but as they are bad, and would not observe their faith with you, so you are not bound to keep faith with them.

To know how to dissimulate is the knowledge of kings.

It is a double pleasure to deceive the deceiver.

A sheep in sheep's clothing.

We avenge intelligence when we deceive a fool, and the victory is worth the trouble

Figures won’t lie but liars will figure.

Nowhere on the planet, nowhere in history, was there a regime more vicious, more bloodthirsty, and at the same time more cunning than the Bolshevik, the self-styled Soviet regime.

O divine art of subtlety and secrecy!

Oh, what a tangled web we weave when first we practice to believe.

Talleyrand is a silk stocking filled with mud.

Any fool can tell the truth, but it requires a man of some sense to know how to lie well.

Maniacal self-promoter …. Makes Machiavelli look like a simple, straightforward kinda guy.

Every great story seems to begin with a snake.

Malefactors of great wealth

Our revolution has made me feel the full force of the axiom that history is fiction and I am convinced that chance and intrigue have produced more heroes than genius and virtue.

Nothing is so treacherous as the obvious.

Note that venerable proverb: Children and fools always speak the truth. The deduction is plain: adults and wise persons never speak it.

An honest man is all right even if he's an idiot...but a crook must have brains.

All the world will be your enemy, Prince of a Thousand enemies. And when they catch you, they will kill you. But first they must catch you; digger, listener, runner, Prince with the swift warning. Be cunning, and full of tricks, and your people will never be destroyed.

No human beings, black, yellow, or white could be quite as untruthful, as insincere, as arrogant—in short, as untrustworthy in every way—as the Russians.

It was easier to trip a fool than to knock him down.

The best liar is he who makes the smallest amount of lying go the longest way.