Quotes & Sayings About Cronies

They had not brains enough to be introverted and repressed. Cronies — Joseph Heller

The difficulties of many European countries derive from their corporatism: state projects serving cronies and vast social protection programmes, both run by elites. These surged in the 1970s and 1980s. — Edmund Phelps

In a June 25, 2010, Washington Post article, the CIA acknowledged officially
discussing the creation of a video of a fake Saddam Hussein having sex with a
teenage boy in order to discredit him in the eyes of the Iraqi people. Evidently,
the Agency did create a video of a fake Osama Bin Laden drinking liquor
around a campfire with his cronies, bragging about their conquests of young
boys. The article quoted an anonymous former CIA officer "chuckling" at the
memory, and declaring that the actors used in the video were drawn from
"some of us darker-skinned employees." These ridiculous clandestine ideas
brought to mind the childish efforts to assassinate Fidel Castro forty years
earlier. — Donald Jeffries

Roger Daltrey had been expelled for smoking, but was still impudently showing up on campus to visit his various cronies. I'd first met him after he won a playground fight with a Chinese boy. I thought his tactics were dirty and when I shouted as much, he came over & forced me to retract. — Pete Townshend

In a country ruled by laws, it seemed to me that nothing was more important than removing politics from the process of choosing judges. During previous administrations in California, governors had often handed out judgeships to friends and cronies like prizes at a company picnic. Not only had this produced a lot of inferior judges, it had placed a number of partisans on the bench who believed that putting on the black robes of a judge gave them a license to rewrite the laws. I wanted judges who would interpret the Constitution, not rewrite it. — Ronald Reagan

I applaud strong government, but not overweening government sustained by cronies, ciphers and a personality cult. — Margaret Thatcher

Golf is the art of driving hard, avoiding the rough, surmounting traps and hazards, aiming straight, and arriving on the green at last, only to end up in a hole in the ground before your companions. The favored pastime of businessmen and their cronies, probably without a full appreciation of its metaphorical implications. — Rick Bayan

Some of my cronies call me a pessimist and a decadent, but there is always a background of faith behind resignation. — Isaac Bashevis Singer

Reading Don Quixote can be compared to an indefinite visit from your most impossible senior relative, with all his pranks, dirty habits, unstoppable reminiscences, and terrible cronies. When the experience is over, and the old boy checks out at last, you will shed tears all right; not tears of relief or regret but tears of pride. You made it, despite all that Don Quixote could do. — Martin Amis

Under the New Deal, governmental goons smashed down doors to impose domestic policies. G-Men were treated like demigods, even as they spied on dissidents. Captains of industry wrote the rules by which they were governed. FDR secretly taped his conversations, used the postal service to punish his enemies, lied repeatedly to maneuver the United States into war, and undermined Congress's war-making powers at several turns. When warned by Frances Perkins in 1932 that many provisions of the New Deal were unconstitutional, he in effect shrugged and said that they'd deal with that later (his intended solution: pack the Supreme Court with cronies). In 1942 he flatly told Congress that if it didn't do what he wanted, he'd do it anyway. — Jonah Goldberg

Our public schools need to be in the control of parents and the community, as opposed to businessmen who see the $23 billion budget as a means to giving no-bid contracts to their cronies. — Charles Barron

Crabbe or Goyle - or, come to think of it, another Death Eater, he'll have loads better cronies than Crabbe and Goyle now he's joined up — J.K. Rowling

What is taking place here should be made very clear: Citizens who are completely innocent of any legal wrongdoing and simply minding their own business--not seeking any litigation and neither convicted nor accused of any legal infraction, criminal or civil--are ordered into court and told to write checks to officials of the court or they will be summarily arrested and jailed, Judges also order citizens to sell their houses and other property and turn the proceeds over to lawyers and other cronies they never hired. Summoning legally unimpeachable citizens to court and forcing them to empty their bank accounts to people they have not hired for services they have neither requested nor received on threat of physical punishment is what most people would call a protection racket. . . Yet family court judges do this as a matter of routine. This is by far the clearest example of what we political scientists term a "kleptocracy," or government by theives. — Stephen Baskerville

They'd arranged to meet with an Omegan mole who worked in the Clinton administration. He was helping them with a new Omega Agency operation involving the Kosovo War, which had just broken out in Europe. Naylor and his cronies were seeking to use Kosovo as a transit route for Afghan heroin bound for EU countries. Despite the official news stories being circulated by mainstream media, Omega knew the extremely lucrative heroin trade was behind the war. — James Morcan

Or there, in the clay-baked piedmont of the South, that lean and tan-faced boy who sprawls there in the creaking chair among admiring cronies before the open doorways of the fire department, and tells them how he pitched the team to shut-out victory to-day. What visions burn, what dreams possess him, seeker of the night? The packed stands of the stadium, the bleachers sweltering with their unshaded hordes, the faultless velvet of the diamond, unlike the clay-balked outfields down in Georgia. The mounting roar of eighty thousand voices and Gehrig coming up to bat, the boy himself upon the pitching mound, the lean face steady as a hound's; then the nod, the signal, and the wind-up, the rawhide arm that snaps and crackles like a whip, the small white bullet of the blazing ball, its loud report in the oiled pocket of the catcher's mitt, the umpire's thumb jerked upwards, the clean strike. — Thomas Wolfe

the way in which he looked round for the approval of his cronies that he was "showing off," so I put in a word to keep him going. "Oh, Mr. Swales, you can't be serious. Surely these tombstones are not all wrong?" "Yabblins! There may be a poorish few not wrong, savin' where they make out the people too good, for there be folk that do think a balm-bowl be like the sea, if only it be their own. The whole thing be only lies. Now look you here. You come here a stranger, — Bram Stoker

As a kid I was always writing and directing plays in my basement with my neighborhood cronies. But please don't get me wrong, I have zero regrets when it comes to the acting stuff. I think it's made me a better director. — Coley Sohn

The great fact emerges that after that historic date all holographs so far exhumed initialled by Haromphrey bear the sigla H.C.E. and while he was only and long and always good Dook Umphrey for the hungerlean splapeens of Lucalizod and Chimbers to his cronies it was equally certainly a pleasant turn of the populace which gave him as sense of those normative letters the nickname Here Comes Everybody — James Joyce

Texans deserve better than failed leaders who dole out favors to friends and cronies behind closed doors. It's time for a governor who believes that you don't have to buy a place in Texas' future. It's time for a governor who believes that the future of Texas belongs to all of us. — Wendy Davis

[Norm said,] 'To all those who argue this war is a mistake, I'd like to point out that we've removed from power one of history's most ruthless and belligerent tyrants. A man who cold-bloodedly murdered thousands of his own people. Who built palaces for his personal pleasure while schools decayed and his country's health care system collapsed. Who maintained one of the world's most expensive armies while he allowed his nation's infrastructure to crumble. Who channeled resources to his cronies and political allies, allowing them to siphon off much of the country's wealth for their own personal gain. — Ben Fountain

Every single administration in American political history has put cronies and pals and donors into political positions. But normally those people become the ambassador to Liechtenstein or the deputy undersecretary of commerce. — Irwin Redlener

Foreign trade is not a replacement for foreign aid, of course, but foreign aid to a country that doesn't also engage in significant amounts of foreign trade is more likely to end up in the pockets of dictators and cronies. — Brian Behlendorf

The Byrd cronies retaliated by diverting taxpayer money to fund whites-only "segregation academies," private schools founded to circumvent integrated public schools. — Margot Lee Shetterly

In Russia today, 110 persons, including Mr. Putin's cronies, control 35% of the country's wealth while 50% of adults have total household wealth of $871 or lower. — Anonymous

For most of the twentieth century, directors were paid largely in cash. Now, so that their interests will be aligned with those of shareholders, much of their pay is in stock. Boards of directors were once populated by corporate insiders, family members, and cronies of the C.E.O. Today, boards have many more independent directors, and C.E.O.s typically have less influence over how boards run. And S.E.C. reforms since the early nineteen-nineties have forced companies to be transparent about executive compensation. — Anonymous

My parents lived by Rancho Park. And my mom, later in life, got into playing golf. She and her male cronies would get up at five in the morning and sneak onto the back nine. I kind of just started getting into it. For a long time, I was really puzzled by why people liked it. — Kim Gordon

Hussein has chosen to spend his money on building weapons of mass destruction and palaces for his cronies. — Madeleine Albright

[Congress] and their cronies secure more than one hundred billion dollars in corporate welfare — Lawrence Lessig

Comfort and indolence are cronies. — Thomas Hood

I am against government by crony. — Harold L. Ickes