Quotes about crook (183 quotes) | Quotes of famous people

“While the Zionists try to make the rest of the World believe that the national consciousness of the Jew finds its satisfaction in the creation of a Palestinian state, the Jews again slyly dupe the dumb Goyim. It doesn't even enter their heads to build up a Jewish state in Palestine for the purpose of living there; all they want is a central organisation for their international world swindler, endowed with its own sovereign rights and removed from the intervention of other states: a haven for convicted scoundrels and a university for budding crooks.
It is a sign of their rising confidence and sense of security that at a time when one section is still playing the German, French-man, or Englishman, the other with open effrontery comes out as the Jewish race.”

Adolf Hitler book Mein Kampf

1920s, Zweites Buch (1928)
Source: Mein Kampf
Context: Jewry is a Folk with a racial core that is not wholly unitary. Nevertheless, as a Folk, it has special intrinsic characteristics which separate it from all other Folks living on the globe. Jewry is not a religious community, but the religious bond between Jews; rather is in reality the momentary governmental system of the Jewish Folk. The Jew has never had a territorially bounded State of his own in the manner of Aryan States. Nevertheless, his religious community is a real State, since it guarantees the preservation, the increase and the future of the Jewish Folk. But this is solely the task of the State. That the Jewish State is subject to no territorial limitation, as is the case with Aryan States, is connected with the character of the Jewish Folk, which is lacking in the productive forces for the construction and preservation of its own territorial State.

World , Confidence , Sense , Universe

“There's plenty more fish in the sea than Prince Jonathan," he told her softly. "And this particular fish loves you with all his crooked heart."
-George to Alanna”

Tamora Pierce The Woman Who Rides Like a Man

Source: The Woman Who Rides Like a Man

Love , Fish , Heart , Sea

“This country has nothing to fear from the crooked man who fails. We put him in jail. It is the crooked man who succeeds who is a threat to this country.”

Theodore Roosevelt (1858–1919) American politician, 26th president of the United States

Address in Memphis, Tennessee (25 October 1905) http://www.trsite.org/content/pages/speaking-loudly
1900s

Fear , Country

“There's one way to find out if a man is honest: ask him; if he says yes, you know he's crooked.”

Mark Twain (1835–1910) American author and humorist

Way

“There's one way to find out if a man is honest - ask him. If he says "yes" you know he is a crook.”

Groucho Marx (1890–1977) American comedian

Way

“A person who has good thoughts cannot ever be ugly. You can have a wonky nose and a crooked mouth and a double chin and stick-out teeth, but if you have good thoughts they will shine out of your face like sunbeams and you will always look lovely.”

Roald Dahl book The Twits

Source: The Twits

Love , Personality

“The path of least resistance leads to crooked rivers and crooked men.”

Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862) 1817-1862 American poet, essayist, naturalist, and abolitionist

Men

“Glance into the world just as though time were gone: and everything crooked will become straight to you.”

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) German philosopher, poet, composer, cultural critic, and classical philologist

Source: Sämtliche Werke: Kritische Studienausgabe in 15 Einzelbänden

World , Time

“By hook or by crook this peril too shall be something that we remember”

Homér The Odyssey (Cowper)

Source: The Odyssey

“Who can ever know what path to walk on when all of them are either crooked or broken? One just has to walk.”

Ishmael Beah (1980) Sierra Leone writer

Source: Radiance of Tomorrow

“Conditioning obstructs our view of reality. — We do not see IT in its suchness because of our indoctrination, crooked and twisted.”

Bruce Lee (1940–1973) Hong Kong-American actor, martial artist, philosopher and filmmaker

Source: Striking Thoughts (2000), p. 19

Reality

“The bosses of the Democratic party and the bosses of the Republican party alike have a closer grip than ever before on the party machines in the States and in the Nation. This crooked control of both the old parties by the beneficiaries of political and business privilege renders it hopeless to expect any far-reaching and fundamental service from either.”

Theodore Roosevelt (1858–1919) American politician, 26th president of the United States

"Platform Insincerity" in The Outlook, Vol. 101, No. 13 (27 July 1912), p. 660
1910s

Business

“Fewer people are bent from hard work than are crooked from avoiding it.”

Zig Ziglar (1926–2012) American motivational speaker

See You at the Top (2000)

People

“To make more plans than an explorer or a crook, yet to be infected at the will's very root.”

Emil M. Cioran (1911–1995) Romanian philosopher and essayist

The New Gods (1969)

“Mankind has become one, but not steadfastly one as communities or even nations used to be; not united through years of mutual experience, neither through possession of a single eye, affectionately called crooked, nor yet through a common native language, but, surpassing all barriers, through international broadcasting and print. An avalanche of events descends upon us — in one minute half the world hears of their splash. But the yardstick by which to measure those events and to evaluate them in accordance with the laws of unfamiliar parts of the world — this is not and cannot be conveyed via soundwaves and in newspaper columns. For these yardsticks were matured and assimilated over too many years of too specific conditions in individual countries and societies; they cannot be exchanged in mid-air. In the various parts of the world men apply their own hard-earned values to events, and they judge stubbornly, confidently, only according to their own scales of values and never according to any others.”

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918–2008) Russian writer

Nobel lecture (1970)

Men , World , Law , Confidence

“Slavery is wrong in its effect upon white people and free labor; it is the only thing that threatens the Union. It makes what Senator Seward has been much abused for calling an 'irrepressible conflict'. When they get ready to settle it, we hope they will let us know. Public opinion settles every question here, any policy to be permanent must have public opinion at the bottom, something in accordance with the philosophy of the human mind as it is. The property basis will have its weight. The love of property and a consciousness of right or wrong have conflicting places in our organization, which often make a man's course seem crooks, his conduct a riddle.”

Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865) 16th President of the United States

1860s, Speech at Hartford (1860)

Love , People , Hope , Question

“So our next move is to take the entire civil rights struggle problems into the United Nations, and let the world see that Uncle Sam is guilty of violating the human rights of 22 million Afro-Americans…
Uncle Sam... and still has the audacity or the nerve to stand up and represent himself as the leader of the free world. Not only is he a crook, he’s a hypocrite. Here he is standing up in front of other people, Uncle Sam, with the blood of your and my mothers and fathers on his hands, with the blood dripping down his jaws like a bloody-jawed wolf, and still got the nerve to point his finger at other countries. You can’t even get civil rights legislation. And this man has got the nerve to stand up and talk about South Africa, or talk about Nazi Germany, or talk about Deutschland.”

Malcolm X (1925–1965) American human rights activist

The Ballot or the Bullet (1964), Speech in Detroit, Michigan (12 April 1964)

People , World , Problem , Wolf

“I would always love Alaska Young, my crooked neighbor, with all my crooked heart.”

John Green book Looking for Alaska

Miles "Pudge" Halter, p. 218
Looking for Alaska (2005)

Love , Heart

“O love is the crooked thing,
There is nobody wise enough
To find out all that is in it,
For he would be thinking of love
Till the stars had run away
And the shadows eaten the moon.”

W.B. Yeats (1865–1939) Irish poet and playwright

Brown Penny http://poetry.poetryx.com/poems/1454/
The Green Helmet and Other Poems (1910)

Love , Star , Thinking

“A story is not like a road to follow … it's more like a house. You go inside and stay there for a while, wandering back and forth and settling where you like and discovering how the room and corridors relate to each other, how the world outside is altered by being viewed from these windows. And you, the visitor, the reader, are altered as well by being in this enclosed space, whether it is ample and easy or full of crooked turns, or sparsely or opulently furnished. You can go back again and again, and the house, the story, always contains more than you saw the last time. It also has a sturdy sense of itself of being built out of its own necessity, not just to shelter or beguile you.”

Alice Munro book Selected Stories

Selected Stories, 1968-1994 (1996)

World , Sense , Time , Housing

“And that’s the lesson of our past. That's the promise of tomorrow -- that in the face of impossible odds, people who love their country can change it. That when millions of Americans of every race and every region, every faith and every station, can join together in a spirit of brotherhood, then those mountains will be made low, and those rough places will be made plain, and those crooked places, they straighten out towards grace, and we will vindicate the faith of those who sacrificed so much and live up to the true meaning of our creed, as one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.”

Barack Obama (1961) 44th President of the United States of America

2013, "Let Freedom Ring" Ceremony (August 2013)
Context: p>Everyone who realizes what those glorious patriots knew on that day -- that change does not come from Washington, but to Washington; that change has always been built on our willingness, We The People, to take on the mantle of citizenship -- you are marching.And that’s the lesson of our past. That's the promise of tomorrow -- that in the face of impossible odds, people who love their country can change it. That when millions of Americans of every race and every region, every faith and every station, can join together in a spirit of brotherhood, then those mountains will be made low, and those rough places will be made plain, and those crooked places, they straighten out towards grace, and we will vindicate the faith of those who sacrificed so much and live up to the true meaning of our creed, as one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.</p

Love , God , People , Faith

“The worst type is the Big Politician who gives about half his time to covering up so that no one will know he's a thief. A hard-working crook can buy these birds by the dozens, but he hates them in his heart.”

Al Capone (1899–1947) American gangster

Bird , Time , Heart , Hate

“A crook is a crook, and there's something healthy about his frankness in the matter. But the guy who pretends he's enforcing the law and steals on his authority is a swell snake.”

Al Capone (1899–1947) American gangster

Guy , Law

“I think very poorly of United Russia. United Russia is the party of corruption, the party of crooks and thieves. And it is the duty of every patriot and citizen of our country to make sure that this party is destroyed.”

Alexey Navalny (1976) Russian anti-corruption activist

As quoted in "Net Impact: One man's cyber-crusade against Russian corruption" http://archive.is/FGqQE (4 April 2011), by Julia Ioffe, The New Yorker

Thinking , Making love , Country

“Very well then, better a sane crook than a mad puritan.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald book Tender Is the Night

Source: Tender Is the Night

Madness

“The cheaper the crook, the gaudier the patter.”

Dashiell Hammett book The Maltese Falcon

Spade
Source: The Maltese Falcon (1930)

“Everybody's crooked. The trick is to find out how they're bent.”

Jennifer Crusie (1949) American writer

Source: Faking It

“When you see the Crooked Warden," said Locke, twisting something in his hands, "tell him that Lock Lamora learns slowly, but he learns well. And when you see my friends, you tell them that there are more of you on the way.”

Scott Lynch The Lies of Locke Lamora

Source: The Lies of Locke Lamora

Way , Learning

“May your trails be crooked, winding, lonesome, dangerous, leading to the most amazing view.”

Edward Abbey (1927–1989) American author and essayist

“I have a dream that one day, down in Alabama, with its vicious racists, with its governor having his lips dripping with the words of "interposition" and "nullification" — one day right there in Alabama little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers. I have a dream today. I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made plain, and the crooked places will be made straight, and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together. This is our hope. This is the faith with which I return to the South. With this faith we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope. With this faith we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood. With this faith we will be able to work together, to pray together, to struggle together, to go to jail together, to stand up for freedom together, knowing that we will be free one day.”

Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–1968) American clergyman, activist, and leader in the American Civil Rights Movement

1960s, (1963)
Source: I Have A Dream

Faith , Beauty , Dreams , Hope

“Criticism of others is thus an oblique form of self-commendation. We think we make the picture hang straight on our wall by telling our neighbors that all his pictures are crooked.”

Fulton J. Sheen (1895–1979) Catholic bishop and television presenter

Source: Seven Words of Jesus and Mary: Lessons from Cana and Calvary

Thinking

“He is crooked enough to hide behind a spiral staircase.”

Anne McCaffrey book Acorna's Quest

Source: Acorna's Quest

“Why' is a crooked letter and can't be made straight.”

Stephen King book The Gunslinger

Source: The Gunslinger

“I'm still a little bent, a little crooked, but all things considered, I can't complain.”

Anthony Kiedis book Scar Tissue

Source: Scar Tissue

“Isabelle and Sebastian? Hardly. Sebastian’s a nice guy – Isabelle only likes dating thoroughly inappropriate boys our parents will hate. Mundanes, Downworlders, petty crooks…”
“Thanks,” Simon said. “I’m glad to be classed with the criminal element.”

Cassandra Clare book City of Glass

Source: City of Glass

Hate , Guy , Boy , Parent

“Improvement makes straight roads; but the crooked roads without improvement are roads of genius.”

William Blake book The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

Source: 1790s, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790–1793), Proverbs of Hell, Line 66

“Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made.”

Immanuel Kant book Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose

Idea for a General History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose (1784), Proposition 6.
Variant translations: Out of timber so crooked as that from which man is made nothing entirely straight can be built.
From such crooked wood as that which man is made of, nothing straight can be fashioned.
Never a straight thing was made from the crooked timber of man.
Source: Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose

“Built like an oak tree, against which I could pitch my pillow and read; mornings, I could curl into the crook of your branches.”

Lionel Shriver book We Need to Talk About Kevin

Source: We Need to Talk About Kevin

Tree , Reading

“Pursue some path, however narrow and crooked, in which you can walk with love and reverence.”

Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862) 1817-1862 American poet, essayist, naturalist, and abolitionist

love , Peaceful , Cute , Romantic

“All we have to do is get out and vote, while it's still legal, and we will wash those crooked warmongers out of the White House.”

Hunter S. Thompson (1937–2005) American journalist and author

Housing

“The Word of God I think of as a straight edge, which shows up our own crookedness. We can't really tell how crooked our thinking is until we line it up with the straight edge of Scripture.”

Elisabeth Elliot (1926–2015) American missionary

God , Thinking

“May your trails be crooked, winding, lonesome, dangerous, leading to the most amazing view. May your mountains rise into and above the clouds.”

Edward Abbey book Desert Solitaire

Preface (dated June 1987) for 1988 reprint of Desert Solitaire
Desert Solitaire (1968)
Context: May your trails be crooked, winding, lonesome, dangerous, leading to the most amazing view. May your mountains rise into and above the clouds. May your rivers flow without end, meandering through pastoral valleys tinkling with bells, past temples and castles and poets' towers into a dark primeval forest where tigers belch and monkeys howl, through miasmal and mysterious swamps and down into a desert of red rock, blue mesas, domes and pinnacles and grottos of endless stone, and down again into a deep vast ancient unknown chasm where bars of sunlight blaze on profiled cliffs, where deer walk across the white sand beaches, where storms come and go as lightning clangs upon the high crags, where something strange and more beautiful and more full of wonder than your deepest dreams waits for you — beyond that next turning of the canyon walls.

Mountain

“with his customary crooked smile, “are just too unlikely to dwell upon.”

Cassandra Clare book City of Fallen Angels

Source: City of Fallen Angels

Smile

“No one ever died from sleeping in an unmade bed. I have known mothers who remake the bed after their children do it because there is wrinkle in the spread or the blanket is on crooked. This is sick.”

Erma Bombeck (1927–1996) When I stand before God at the end of my life, I would hope that I would not have a single bit of talent le…

Children , Sleep

“These houses had been plunked down with an alarming randomness -- unevenly spaced, on crooked lines, like whoever had designed the place had said, "We'll just follow this cat, and wherever he sits down, we'll build something.”

Maureen Johnson book Let It Snow

Source: Let It Snow: Three Holiday Romances

Cats , Housing

“Crooked cards and straight whiskey,
Slow horses and fast women.”

Kenneth Rexroth (1905–1982) American poet, writer, anarchist, academic and conscientious objector

Women , Horse

“You can't trust water: Even a straight stick turns crooked in it.”

W.C. Fields (1880–1946) actor

Water

“Let me tell you, Alex. He's a crook. He's based here in Miami. He's a nasty piece of work."
"He's mexican" Troy added.”

Anthony Horowitz book Skeleton Key

Source: Skeleton Key

“Zaphod Beeblebrox, adventurer, ex-hippie, good-timer (crook? quite possibly), manic self-publicist, terribly bad at personal relationships, often thought to be completely out to lunch.”

Douglas Adams (1952–2001) English writer and humorist

Personality

“I do have one slightly crooked wheel upstairs, but everything else is ticking along just four-o, thank you very much.”

Stephen King book The Bachman Books

Source: The Bachman Books

“I am a politician which means I am a liar and a crook. When I am not kissing babies I am stealing their lollypops.”

Tom Clancy (1947–2013) American author

Kiss , Baby

“This new quantum mechanics promised to explain all of chemistry. And though I felt an exuberance at this, I felt a certain threat, too. “Chemistry,” wrote Crookes, “will be established upon an entirely new basis…. We shall be set free from the need for experiment, knowing a priori what the result of each and every experiment must be.” I was not sure I liked the sound of this. Did this mean that chemists of the future (if they existed) would never actually need to handle a chemical; might never see the colors of vanadium salts, never smell a hydrogen selenide, never admire the form of a crystal; might live in a colorless, scentless, mathematical world? This, for me, seemed and awful prospect, for I, at least, needed to smell and touch and feel, to place myself, my senses, in the middle of the perceptual world.”

Oliver Sacks book Uncle Tungsten

Source: Uncle Tungsten (2001), pp. 312–313

World , Color , Feeling , Mathematics

“I do not regard the late Carl Sagan as any kind of authority. On the contrary, as this book will show, I regard him in many ways as a dubious publicity seeker and careerist, more concerned to maintain his reputation as the brilliant and sceptical representative of hard-headed science than to look squarely and honestly at the facts. In short, a bit of a crook.”

Colin Wilson (1931–2013) author

Source: Alien Dawn (1998), pp. xix-xx

Books , Way , Science

“I shared, naturally, in that hatred of organized labor which has been the one political constant in my lifetime, culminating in Ronald Reagan's most popular gesture, the smashing of the air-controllers' union. No alternative view of organized labor has ever come to us through the popular media. If labor leaders were not crooks like Jimmy Hoffa, they were in the pay of Moscow.”

Gore Vidal (1925–2012) American writer

Source: 1990s, Screening History (1992), Ch. 2: Fire Over England, p. 34

Nature

“The thing to fear from the Trump presidency is not the bold overthrow of the Constitution, but the stealthy paralysis of governance; not the open defiance of law, but an accumulating subversion of norms; not the deployment of state power to intimidate dissidents, but the incitement of private violence to radicalize supporters. Trump operates not by strategy, but by instinct. His great skill is to sniff his opponents' vulnerabilities: "low energy", "little", "crooked", "fake". In the same way, Trump has intuited the weak points in the American political system and in American political culture. Trump gambled that Americans resent each other's differences more than they cherish their shared democracy. So far, that gamble has paid off.”

David Frum (1960) American political commentator

Trumpocracy: The Corruption of the American Republic (2018)

Fear , Law , Way , Democracy

“It was the work of opportunists, crooks, thugs for their own self-gain and interest.”

Kamisese Mara (1920–2004) President of Fiji

Attributed to him posthumously by his friend, business tycoon Hari Punja[citation needed]

“As a dreamer of dreams and a travelin' man,
I have chalked up many a mile.
Read dozens of books about heroes and crooks,
And I've learned much from both of their styles.”

Jimmy Buffett (1946) American singer–songwriter and businessman

Son of a Son of a Sailor
Song lyrics, Son of a Son of a Sailor (1978)

Books , Dreams , Learning , Reading

“Lines formed at Ruby Pier - just as a line formed someplace else: Five people, waiting, in five chosen memories, for a little girl named Amy or Annie to grow and to love and to age and to die, and to finally have her questions answered - why she lived and what she lived for. And in that line now was a whiskered old man, with a linen cap and a crooked nose, who waited in a place called the Stardust Band Shell to share his part of the secret of heaven: That each affects the other and the other affects the next, and the world is full of stories, but the stories are all one.”

Mitch Albom book The Five People You Meet in Heaven

The Five People You Meet in Heaven (2003)

Love , People , Secret , Age

“God draweth straight lines but we call them crooked.”

Horace Mann (1796–1859) American politician

The Common School Journal, Vol. V, No. 18 (15 September 1843)

God

“Politics, the crooked timber of our communal lives, dominates everything because, in the end, everything — high and low and, most especially, high — lives or dies by politics. You can have the most advanced and efflorescent of cultures. Get your politics wrong, however, and everything stands to be swept away. This is not ancient history. This is Germany 1933. […] Politics is the moat, the walls, beyond which lie the barbarians. Fail to keep them at bay, and everything burns.”

Charles Krauthammer (1950–2018) American journalist

Introduction
2010s, 2013, Things That Matter: Three Decades of Passions, Pastimes and Politics (2013)

Lie , History , Communication

“I am shocked that we should be debating a Bill such as this which basically shows the Tory party's deep concern for its future. It has to scrabble round the world looking for tax dodgers, crooks, thieves and wastrels, anywhere that it can, in order to get a Tory Government re-elected in two years' time. That is what the Bill is about. It has nothing to do with democracy.”

Jeremy Corbyn (1949) British Labour Party politician

Speech http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1989/jun/29/representation-of-the-people-bill in the House of Commons (29 June 1989) on the Representation of the People Act 1989.
1980s

World , Democracy , Time , Future

“Well, it's been the monopolizing of great wealth, which tends to happen in basically unjust societies and undemocratic societies. We have plenty of would-be democrats, would-be liberals, and would-be progressives. But how do you organize? The Democratic Party is a machine to get votes for its people, none of who should probably be elected to the high offices of state. That's all. The Republican Party is fundamentally crooked and might well be outlawed one of these days. Le Pen, you know, in France, who is an out-and-out fascist, the French have managed in some clever way to contain him. I mean, he's always running for president; his votes never seem to show up. I don't know how they do it, but we've got to do that with the Republican base, the religious right. We don't want them running the country. Nobody does. Certainly not the founding fathers. And I think we have to ride herd on them and make sure they do not seize the state.”

Gore Vidal (1925–2012) American writer

On fascism http://therealnews.com/t/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=74&jumival=342
2000s, What I've Learned (2008), Gore Vidal's America (2009)

People , Way , Thinking , Country

“I still believe that majority of our officers and men in uniform are honest and hardworking. It would be a disservice to lump them together with those crooked individuals.”

Francis Escudero (1969) Filipino politician

The Philippine Star http://www.philstar.com/headlines/653601/review-plea-bargaining-agreement-garcia-enrile
2011

Men

“Republicans want smaller government for the same reason crooks want fewer cops: it's easier to get away with murder.”

James Carville (1944) political writer, consultant and United States Marine

In Had enough?: A handbook for fighting back (2003), p. 21 http://books.google.com/books?id=gH4bMmu4CA4C

“The economy is crooked not straight; and mainstream economists are like flat-earthers who keep saying the world is flat despite all the evidence to the contrary.”

David Orrell (1962) Canadian mathematician

Source: The Other Side Of The Coin (2008), Chapter 7, Straight Versus Crooked, p. 228

World

“Before we reach the majestic shores of the Promised Land, there is a frustrating and bewildering wilderness ahead. We must still face prodigious hilltops of opposition and gigantic mountains of resistance. But with patient and firm determination we will press on until every valley of despair is exalted to new peaks of hope, until every mountain of pride and irrationality is made low by the leveling process of humility and compassion; until the rough places of injustice are transformed into a smooth plane of equality of opportunity; and until the crooked places of prejudice are transformed by the straightening process of bright-eyed wisdom.”

Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–1968) American clergyman, activist, and leader in the American Civil Rights Movement

1960s, The Quest for Peace and Justice (1964)

Wisdom , Hope , Mountain , Despair

“One of the most influential figures in Philippine cinema, Da King touched the lives of many people even before running for the presidency in 2004. A prolific and outstanding actor who won the most best actor awards from FAMAS, he would not need his acting skills in 2004--as his genuine concern for Filipinos of all walks of life was apparent as he went around the country to campaign against a government that was as crooked and menacing as the villains he faced in his movies.”

Francis Escudero (1969) Filipino politician

2009, Statement: Remembering the King

Life , People , Country

“A true scholarship would examine, and then either accept or reject, with good reason, any new theory which challenges a generally accepted theory admitted to be full of sharp anomalies. However, this has not been the attitude of world scholarship towards our earlier book. The general attitude has been as follows: there is a school of crank scholarship in India which is out to prove, by hook or by crook, that India was the original homeland of the Indo-European family of languages; and the writers of this school deserve to be firmly put in their place. And the best method of doing this is by tarring all scholars who support, or even appear to support, an Indian homeland theory, with one brush; and then pointing out particularly untenable propositions made by one or the other of the scholars so branded together, to prove that all the scholars so named belong to one single school of irrational scholarship.”

Shrikant Talageri (1958) Indian author

Shrikant Talageri, The Rigveda: A Historical Analysis, 2000.
The Rigveda: A Historical Analysis (2000), Chapter 9 : Michael Witzel - An Examination of Western Vedic Scholarship

Books , World , School , Family

“How can Crooked Hillary say she cares about women when she is silent on radical Islam, which horribly oppresses women?”

Donald J. Trump (1946) 45th President of the United States of America

Tweet https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/734468142303305728 (22 May 2016)
2010s, 2016, May

Women

“ISIS is honoring President Obama. He is the founder of ISIS. He founded ISIS. And I would say the co-founder would be crooked Hillary Clinton.”

Donald J. Trump (1946) 45th President of the United States of America

During a Florida rally at the BB&T Center in Sunrise, as quoted in "Donald Trump: President Barack Obama 'Is the Founder of ISIS'" http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/donald-trump-president-barack-obama-founder-isis/story?id=41286869 by David Caplan, ABC News (August 10, 2016)
2010s, 2016, August

“Ever since grade school, when his father had shown him the stock tables at the back of the newspaper and told him that the stock market was a crooked place and never to be trusted, let alone invested in, the subject had fascinated him.”

Michael Lewis book The Big Short

Source: The Big Short (2010), Chapter Two, In the Land Of The Blind, p. 35

School

“For a long time I've been telling Stalin that Beria is a crook but Stalin won't listen.”

Grigoriy Ordzhonikidze (1886–1937) Soviet politician

Quoted in "Armed truce: the beginnings of the Cold War 1945-46"‎ - Page 65 - by Hugh Thomas - History - 1986

Time

“We shall not meet again: over the wave
Our ways divide, and yours is straight and endless –
But mine is short and crooked to the grave:
Yet what of these dark crowds, amid whose flow
I battle like a rock, aloof and friendless –
Are not their generations, vague and endless,
The waves, the strides, the feet on which I go?”

Roy Campbell (poet) (1901–1957) South African poet

"Tristan da Cunha," lines 97-103
Adamastor (1930)

Way

“Crooked spin can't come to rest,I'm damaged bad at best.”

Elliott Smith (1969–2003) American singer-songwriter

Say Yes.
Lyrics, Either/Or (1997)

“Consent in virtue knit your hearts so fast,
That still the knot, in spite of death, does last;
For as your tears, and sorrow-wounded soul,
Prove well that on your part this bond is whole,
So all we know of what they do above,
Is that they happy are, and that they love.
Let dark oblivion, and the hollow grave,
Content themselves our frailer thoughts to have;
Well-chosen love is never taught to die,
But with our nobler part invades the sky.
Then grieve no more that one so heavenly shaped
The crooked hand of trembling age escaped;
Rather, since we beheld her not decay,
But that she vanish'd so entire away,
Her wondrous beauty, and her goodness, merit
We should suppose that some propitious spirit
In that celestial form frequented here,
And is not dead, but ceases to appear.”

Edmund Waller (1606–1687) English poet and politician

Upon the Death of My Lady Rich (1664).
Poetical Works of Edmund Waller and Sir John Denham (1857)

Love , Death , Age , Beauty

“We're going to keep pounding. These guys [Bush Administration] are the most crooked, you know, lying group I've ever seen. It's scary.”

John F. Kerry (1943) politician from the United States

Kerry uttered these words, not knowing there was a microphone recording it March 12, 2004 http://www.ctv.ca/servlet/ArticleNews/story/CTVNews/1079091913092_74501113/?hub=World

Guy , Lying

“It would actually be quite nice if the American ambassador in Britain could pay the charge that everybody else is paying and not actually try and skive out of it like some chiselling little crook.”

Ken Livingstone (1945) Mayor of London between 2000 and 2008

While being interviewed in the street during his dispute with several embassies for not paying Central London's congestion charge (late March 2006). The Times http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article697933.ece, 28 March 2006. <sup>[ New York Times comment http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/02/world/europe/02parking.html?_r=1&oref=slogin, 2 May 2006.]</sup>

“My ears open nasals! beware! such joy is yours o my people to sense see ear scent drink everything everything everything taratatatatata the machineguns shouting twisting under a thousand bites slaps traaktraak cudgellings whippings pic pac POUMTOUMB juggling clowns’ jump in full sky height 200 meters it's the gunshooting Downwards guffaws of swamps laughter buffalos chariots stings prancing of horses ammunition-wagons flue flac zang chaak chaak rearings pirouettes patatraak bespatterings manesneighings i i i i i i i medley tinklings three bulgarian batallions on the move crook- craak (double bar slowly) Choumi Maritza o Karvavena officers' shouts copper plates knocking against each other pam ici (vite) pac over there BOUM-pam-pam-pam here there there farther all around very high look-out goddamnit on the head chaak marvelous! flames flames flames flames flames flames flames crawl from forts over there Choukri Pacha telephone orders to 27 forts in turkish German hello Ibrahim! Rudolf hello! hello! actors roles blowing-echoes odor-hay-mud-manure I can't feel my frozen feet stale odor rotting gongs flutes clarinets pipes everywhere up down birds twitter beatitude shade greenness cipcip ip-zzip herds pastures dong-dong-dong-ding-bééé Orchestra”

Luigi Russolo (1885–1947) Electronic music pioneer and Futurist painter

Source: 1910's, The Art of Noise', 1913, p. 8

People , Feeling , Drink , Bird

“The glories of our blood and state
Are shadows, not substantial things;
There is no armour against fate;
Death lays his icy hand on kings:
Sceptre and Crown
Must tumble down,
And in the dust be equal made
With the poor crooked scythe and spade.”

James Shirley The Contention of Ajax and Ulysses

sc. iii.
The Contention of Ajax and Ulysses

Death , Fate

“My job was to keep the house clean, get the children off to school, help the cook-housekeeper, and serve at table. The house was much more perfect than the sort of gilt-bordered Christmas-card-Heaven that a crooked-nosed woman would sacrifice everything to attain in the next world: it was an all-electric house, with machines being plugged in and started up all day long; there was no such thing as a fire; heat came from hot-springs underground, and the glowing embers in the fireplace were made of glass.”

Halldór Laxness book The Atom Station

Atómstöðin (The Atom Station) (1948)

Children , World , School , Spring

“The deathless gods are near among men and mark all those who oppress their fellows with crooked judgements, and reck not the anger of the gods.”

Hesiod book Works and Days

Source: Works and Days (c. 700 BC), line 249.

Men , God , Anger

“When I went into the clinic last April 30, George Bush was about 50 points ahead of his closest Democratic opponent in next year's Presidential Election. When I finally escaped from the horrible place, less than three weeks later, Bush's job-approval ratings had been cut in half — and even down into single digits, in some states — and the Republican Party was panicked and on the run. It was a staggering reversal in a very short time, even shorter than it took for his equally crooked father to drop from 93 percent approval, down to as low as 43 percent and even 41 percent in the last doomed days of the first doomed Bush Administration. After that, he was Bill Clinton's punching bag.”

Hunter S. Thompson (1937–2005) American journalist and author

2000s, Welcome to the Big Darkness (2003)

Time

“In every country the intellectual class is the most influential class. This is the class which can foresee, advise and lead. In no country does the mass of the people live the life for intelligent thought and action. It is largely imitative and follows the intellectual class. There is no exaggeration in saying that the entire destination of the country depends upon its intellectual class. If the intellectual class is honest and independent, it can be trusted to take the initiative and give a proper lead when a crisis arises. It is true that the intellect by itself is no virtue. It is only a means and the use of a means depends upon the ends which an intellectual person pursues. An intellectual man can be a good man but he may easily be a rogue. Similarly an intellectual class may be a band of high-souled persons, ready to help, ready to emancipate erring humanity or it may easily be a gang of crooks or a body of advocates of narrow clique from which it draws its support.”

Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar (1891–1956) Father of republic India, champion of human rights, father of India's Constitution, polymath, revolutionary…

Speech delivered to the Bombay Presidency Mahar Conference (31 May 1936) http://www.columbia.edu/itc/mealac/pritchett/00ambedkar/txt_ambedkar_salvation.html

Life , People , Soul , Intelligence

“The force that through the green fuse drives the flower
Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees
Is my destroyer.
And I am dumb to tell the crooked rose
My youth is bent by the same wintry fever.”

Dylan Thomas (1914–1953) Welsh poet and writer

" The Force That Through the Green Fuse Drives the Flower http://www.internal.org/view_poem.phtml?poemID=266" (1934), st. 1

Youth , Age , Flowers , Tree

“He said that both views were one view and that while men may meet with death in strange and obscure places which they might well have avoided it was more correct to say that no matter how hidden or crooked the path to their destruction yet they would seek it out. He smiled. He spoke as one who seemed to understand that death was the condition of existence and life but an emanation thereof.”

Cormac McCarthy book The Crossing

The Crossing (1994)

Life , Death , Men , Smile

“I know many crooks and they never preach, but I don't know anyone who preaches that isn't a crook also.”

Indro Montanelli (1909–2001) Italian journalist

beppegrillo.it, 7 may, 2008.
2000s - 2010s

“It’s never been such a good time to be a crook. In what other country of laws does one enjoy so much freedom to defraud one’s government and fellow citizens without having to worry about cops showing at the door? Small-time crooks sooner or later end up in the slammer, but our big-time con artists, as we’ve come to learn, are now regarded as the untouchables, too well-heeled and powerful to lock up.”

Charles Simic (1938) American poet

"A Thieves' Thanksgiving," http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2014/nov/26/thieves-thanksgiving/?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=NYR+Goya+Ferrante+crooks&utm_content=NYR+Goya+Ferrante+crooks+CID_8376c474295b4e263a32522d2bbfd922&utm_source=Email%20marketing%20software&utm_term=A%20Thieves%20Thanksgiving New York Review of Books, November 26, 2014

Law , Freedom , Learning , Time

“I stood stonelike at midnight, suspended in my masquerade.
I combed my hair till it was just right and commanded the night brigade.
I was open to pain and crossed by the rain and I walked on a crooked crutch.
I strolled all alone through a fallout zone and came out with my soul untouched.”

Bruce Springsteen (1949) American singer and songwriter

"Growin' Up"
Song lyrics, Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J. (1973)

Pain , Soul , Night

“And when you are poor and have to carry
The Christian creed and wife and children
All on your back, it is too much!
That's why I made the Elixir of Youth,
Which landed me in the jail at Peoria
Branded a swindler and a crook
By the upright Federal Judge!”

Edgar Lee Masters (1868–1950) American writer

" Dr. Siegfried Iseman http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/dr-siegfried-iseman/"

Children , Youth

“I have been with the Court all my life, travelling with the King's Progress.
I didn't know how to go on. I sat and stared at this sentence, until Grundo said, "If you can't do it, I will."
If you didn't know Grundo, you'd think this was a generous offer, but it was a threat really. Grundo is dyslexic. Unless he thinks hard, he writes inside out and backwards. He was threatening me with half a page of crooked writing with words like "inside" turning up as "sindie" and "story" as "otsyr".”

Diana Wynne Jones (1934–2011) English children's fantasy writer

Source: Magids Series, The Merlin Conspiracy (2003), p. 7.
First lines of the novel.

Life , Travel , Thinking

“Now, there are some, and I don’t just mean Communists like you, but thinking men of all political parties, who think that not many of these gods actually exist. Some believe that ‘’none’’ of them exist. There’s just us and an ocean of darkness around us. I’m no philosopher or poet, how would I know the truth? It’s true that all these gods seem to do awfully little work—much like our politicians—and yet keep winning reelection to their golden thrones in heaven, year after year. That’s not to say that I don’t respect them, Mr. Premier! Don’t you ever let that blasphemous idea into your yellow skull. My country is the kind where it pays to play it both ways: the Indian entrepreneur has to be straight and crooked, mocking and believing, sly and sincere, at the same time.”

Aravind Adiga book The White Tiger

The First Night.
The White Tiger (2008)

Men , God , Truth , Way

“There's nothing like spending other peoples money, Gordon and Tony discovered this very quickly, and have been going crazy, ordering off the menu ever since. Tony quickly exited the restaurant, leaving Gordon footing the bill, and thats why we're in the mess we're in now. Meanwhile Tony's laughing all the way to the bank where his £14 million is sitting pretty. It's just disgraceful behaviour and ordinary people are suffering because of the megalomania of those two crooks.”

Munir Butt (1940–2015) British diplomat

Speaking bluntly at a conference at the World Economic Forum, Davos, 2009.[citation needed]

Money , People , Way , Suffering

“No man can get rich in politics unless he's a crook.”

Harry Truman (1884–1972) American politician, 33rd president of the United States (in office from 1945 to 1953)

Variant: Similarly on pg. 136: "About this getting rich in politics. Like I said, you just can't do it unless you're a crook." And earlier: "An honest public servant can't become rich in politics." - Truman's diary, 24 April 1954.
Source: Harry S Truman, quoted in Plain Speaking: An Oral Biography of Harry S Truman by Merle Miller, 1973-1974 SBN 425-02664-7 LOC 73-87198, Berkeley Medallion Edition, October, 1974, Chapter 10. "The Only Defeat − and Then Victory", pg. 134.

“Rockliffe Fellowes gives a likable performance of the secondary crook’s rôle, and there are some decidedly agreeable-looking doughnuts consumed in the first act. And that is about all one can say for Pot Luck.”

Dorothy Parker (1893–1967) American poet, short story writer, critic and satirist

Source: Dorothy Parker: Complete Broadway, 1918–1923 (2014) https://openlibrary.org/books/OL25758762M/Dorothy_Parker_Complete_Broadway_1918-1923, Chapter 5: 1922, p. 260

“She stood and turned around and of course there was nothing there. But she could see him standing there, his hands jammed deep into his pockets, that easy, crooked grin on his pleasant-rather-than-handsome face, leaning lanky and at ease against a monument or one of the stone gateposts or maybe just a tree gone red with fall's dying fire.”

Stephen King book The Dead Zone

The Dead Zone (1979)

Tree

“There's an ideological fervor about this prosecution that's almost religious in its intensity, because let's be clear, this is a heresy trial by any other name. They can't refute Mr. Wilders' statements, so instead they've resorted to the kind of cheap legal stunt we'd expect from the likes of Mugabe to shut their opponent up. They've accused him of being divisive and inflammatory, and yes, sometimes the truth can be divisive and inflammatory if it has been suppressed for long enough and has become sufficiently taboo, as it clearly has in the Netherlands, because according to the prosecution it doesn't even matter that what he says is true; what matters is that it's illegal. Well, when the truth is against the law, then there's something seriously wrong with the law, because when the truth is no defence, there is no defence, and the law has no anchor, so it will drift wherever the wind of political expedience blows, and this week it blew straight into a crooked courtroom in Amsterdam, where justice will now be made to fight for its life, starved of the oxygen of truth that gives it life.”

Pat Condell (1949) Stand-up comedian, writer, and Internet personality

On the trial of Geert Wilders, "The crooked judges of Amsterdam" (5 February 2010) http://youtube.com/watch?v=96ZUZ9CPZII
2010

Life , Truth , Justice , Law

“Though a hundred crooked paths may conduct to a temporary success, the one plain and straight path of public and private virtue can alone lead to a pure and lasting fame and the blessings of posterity.”

Edward Everett (1794–1865) American politician, orator, statesman

Edward Everett, reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 352.

Success

“Skinnner: "OK, half the Tories opposite are not crooks."”

Dennis Skinner (1932) British politician

There is no evidence that Skinner said this. But see quotation from 1 April 1981, above.
It is an old joke which has been around since at least 1927 http://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/04/19/half-fools/.
Misattributed
Variant: Skinner: "Half the Tories opposite are crooks."
Source: "Dennis Skinner Did Not Call Half the Tories Crooks (and How to Verify Other Quotes from Parliament)" https://clioseyeroll.wordpress.com/2016/12/03/dennis-skinner-did-not-call-half-the-tories-crooks-and-how-to-verify-other-quotes-from-parliament/, 03 December 2016.

“Machiavelli, however, took his bearings from people as they are. He defined the political project as making the best of this flawed material. He knew (in words Kant would write almost three centuries later) that nothing straight would be made from the crooked timber of humanity.”

George Will (1941) American newspaper columnist, journalist, and author

Speech at Washington University, Danforth Center for Religion and Politics, St. Louis, broadcast (4 December 2012)
2010s

People

“The Big L was cold crazy, A top-notch crook snatchin' pocket books from old ladies”

Big L (rapper) (1974–1999) American rapper

Books