Sycophant Quotes & Sayings

It's pleasant to get used to the expensive, the soft, the comfortable. Once you're addicted, it's so easy to become a sycophant, to trim the sails of your judgment in order to be kept on. The next step is to change your work to please those in power, and that is death to the sculptor. — Irving Stone

I would rather a thousand times be a free soul in jail than to be a sycophant and coward in the streets. — Eugene V. Debs

Sir, I am no sycophant or worshipper of power anywhere. — Benjamin F. Wade

How can he [today's writer] be honored, when he does not honor himself; when he loses himself in the crowd; when he is no longer the lawgiver, but the sycophant, ducking to the giddy opinion of a reckless public. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

But all this was beside the point. What scared Amy was the mere fact of what looked inescapably like recreational malevolence. The poem had been written by an adult, not some teen with an unfinished brain. Whoever wrote the line bootlicker, sycophant, toady intended damage, understood how Carla would feel, how anybody would feel, being called such names. The line was playful, offhand, the poem itself a smug, imperious cat stretch. The writer was having fun. Amy had been comfortable in the same room with someone whose idea of fun this was. — Jincy Willett

Bullies like him were only strong while assured of victory; when faced with anyone more powerful, they turned into fawning sycophants, desperate to prove themselves. — Jordan L. Hawk

SYCOPHANT- One who approaches Greatness on his belly so that he may not be commanded to turn and be kicked. He is sometimes an editor. — Ambrose Bierce

Well,' said Staines, frowning slightly, 'that's very difficult to say - which to value higher. Honesty or loyalty. From a certain point of view one might say that honesty is a kind of loyalty - loyalty to the truth ... though one would hardly call loyalty a kind of honesty! I suppose that when it came down to it - if I had to choose between being dishonest but loyal, or being disloyal but honest - I'd rather stand by my men, or by my country, or by my family, than by truth. So I suppose I'd say loyalty ... I myself. But in others ... in the case of others, I feel quite differently. I'd much prefer an honest friend to a friend who was merely loyal to me; and I'd much rather be loyal to an honest friend than to a sycophant. Let's say that my answer is conditional; in myself, I value loyalty; on others, honesty — Eleanor Catton

I would add entertainment media cheerleader Wolf Blitzer, CNN's Pentagon sycophant in Kuwait City, a representative of the neon press, neon being that colorless, inert gas that lights up on command. — Stan Goff

Judas is neither a master of evil nor the figure of a demoniacal power of darkness but rather a sycophant who bows before the anonymous power of changing moods and current fashions. But it is precisely this anonymous power that crucified Jesus, for it was anonymous voices that cried 'away with him! Crucify him!' — Pope Benedict XVI

A director must be a policeman, a midwife, a psychoanalyst, a sycophant and a bastard. — Billy Wilder

Sycophant learns from dogs. — Toba Beta

that slimy sycophant Hux — Alan Dean Foster