Yes Men Quotes

As a President, you need to have someone around you who can tell you that you are wrong.

When the President starts lying he begins to need evidence to back up his lies because in this democracy he is questioned on his statements. It then percolates down through the bureaucracy that you are helping the Boss if you come up with evidence that is supportive of our public position and you are distinctly unhelpful if you commit to paper statements that might leak to the wrong people. The effect of that is to poison the flow of information to the President himself and to create a situation where a President can be almost, to use a metaphor, psychotically divorced from the realities in which he is acting....

This condition of freedom, equality, and democracy is not the gift of gods. It is the task of men, yes, men, brave men, honest men, determined men.

Dictators have the power and funds to hire sycophants who encourage them in their delusions.

One of the worries about a presidency is that everybody tells you yes. Nobody helps you figure out where your blind spots are.

I don’t expect anyone to just sit there and agree with me, that’s not their job.

I know that, often, people in entertainment are surrounded by 'yes' men who tell you everything is 'go.' That's never been an issue for me.

I didn't feel the need to have a lot of yes-men standing around me. As Mitchell Sharp once put it, the bigger the staff, the smaller the minister.

People say that when you become famous you're growth is kind of stunted. That kind of makes sense because you are around people who are just agreeing with you and leading you into different places and you don't really make many choices for yourself.

It's the nature of Hollywood that there are the people in power and the people who tell them what they want them to hear.

The best thing is to always keep honest people around, because when you have a bunch of yes men around that know that you're making a mistake but let you go on with it, that's when it ruins your mind state as an artist.

Actors will say 'yes' to anything.

I don't like being surrounded by yes men.

I only have 'yes' men around me. Who needs 'no' men?

The natural tendency is to appoint people whose views and outlook are consonant with yours. Resist that tendency. If you appoint someone who holds your views and outlook, then it is possible that one of you is superfluous.

I surround myself, not with yes men, but people who have their own ideas and are on board with with I want to do.

Most of who's left in the administration now are all these yes men and fanboys who were van drivers or press flacks for Barack Obama in Iowa and New Hampshire in 2008.