Top 94 Shrewd Quotes & Sayings

Bob Hope was an entertainment colossus, shrewd and influential well beyond show business. Richard Zoglin's biography captures it all--the public and private Hope.

By reading the characteristic features of any man's castles in the air you can make a shrewd guess as to his underlying desires which are frustrated.

Male chauvinism is . . . a shrewd method of extracting the maximum of work for the minimum of compensation.

When you enter a casino, remember that you are entering a place of business run by very shrewd business people who understand human emotions.

Boundless in your charity, but shrewd and cautious as a lender, you delight all those today whom you made beggars the day before.

The President's very shrewd

Be mild with the mild, shrewd with the crafty, confiding to the honest, rough to the ruffian, and a thunderbolt to the liar. But in all this, never be unmindful of your own dignity.

Lending books to other people is merely a shrewd form of housecleaning.

The shrewd guess, the fertile hypothesis, the courageous leap to a tentative conclusion - these are the most valuable coins of the thinker at work. But in most schools guessing is heavily penalized and is associated somehow with laziness.

We shouldn't have to be burdened with all the technicalities that come up from time to time with shrewd, smart lawyers interpreting what the laws or what the Constitution may or may not say.

Unfortunately, after Sept. 11, there was an outburst in America of intense suffering and patriotism, and the Bush administration was very shrewd and effective in painting anyone who disagreed with the policies as unpatriotic or even traitorous.

If you want to stay in the business then you've got to be a bit shrewd, haven't you?

There is no doubt that Bronstein's shrewd understanding of chess psychology was crucial to his success. Without it, his impetuous style and technical flaws might have relegated him to a minor career.

O, when she's angry, she is keen and shrewd! She was a vixen when she went to school; And though she be but little, she is fierce.

So often do you see collegians enter life with high resolve and lofty purpose and then watch them shrink and shrink to sordid, selfish, shrewd plodders, full of distrust and sneers.

My first cut was three hours and 17 minutes. And then I just became very shrewd about the editing.

For average working folks, America was becoming a puzzle. Who was buying all these two-hundred-dollar copper saucepans, anyway? And how was everyone paying for these BMWs? Were people shrewd or just stupefyingly irresponsible?

I'm shrewd about money; I invest well and look after it. But it's in my nature to be generous. I look after people.

Man is a shrewd inventor, and is ever taking the hint of a new machine from his own structure, adapting some secret of his own anatomy in iron, wood, and leather, to some required function in the work of the world.

Reason is poor propaganda when opposed by the yammering, unceasing lies of shrewd and evil and self-serving men.

The audience is a very curious animal. It is shrewd rather than intelligent. Its mental capacity is less than that of its most intellectual members.

Never say anything to hurt anyone. Moreover . . . refrain from double talk, from shrewd and canny remarks that are designed to advance our interests at someone's disadvantage. We are to turn our back upon evil, and in every way possible, do good, help people and bring blessings into their lives.

Doyle stokes in a thousand shrewd touches with no effort at all. Wonderful.

You can be a good human being and just be shrewd.

If politics is a game of shrewd and knowing men, Trump has ruined it.

Kids are so shrewd.

Back horses or go down to Throgmorton Street and try to take it away from the Rothschilds, and I will applaud you as a shrewd and cautious financier. But to bet at golf is pure gambling.

The brain's strong point is its flexibility. It is unsurpassed at making shrewd guesses and at grasping the total meaning of information presented to it.

Arnold Schwarzenegger is now governor of California. He is a very shrewd man - he already has all of his sex scandals behind him.

Jeff Beck is my idol .. sometimes he finds notes that I just do not have on my guitar. Frank Zappa's another one .. I loved Frank Zappa ... I do think Van Halen reinvented the guitar ... he's an excellent musician, a shrewd guitarist and as a person he's wonderful.

A talent somewhat above mediocrity, shrewd and not too sensitive, is more likely to rise in the world than genius.

Every spirit makes its house, and we can give a shrewd guess from the house to the inhabitant.

If all you succeed in doing in life is getting rich by buying little pieces of paper, it's a failed life. Life is more than being shrewd in wealth accumulation.

Take from a man his reputation for probity, and the more shrewd and clever he is, the more hated and mistrusted he becomes.

I don't think Vince McMahon is evil or the devil. I think he's a very shrewd business man.

Sometimes I'm surprised when someone who has achieved success is incredibly Machiavellian in their manipulations. So, while I want to believe it's integrity, that might just show how naïve I am. I sometimes worry that I might not be shrewd enough to maneuver myself through the Hollywood system.

It's taken us 10 years, and it was constant excitement. I was constantly shocked by how evil he could be. Mao was very, very shrewd but he didn't have human feeling.

Create strategic alliances and partnerships: Now and in years to come, shrewd leaders will create allegiances with other organizations whose fates are correlated with their own.

Sisters are brittle things. God was penurious with me, which makes me shrewd with Him. One is a dainty sum! One bird, one cage, one flight; one song in those far woods, as yet suspected by faith only!

I'm sure the England selectors thought if they took me on and gave me the job, I'd want to run the show. They were shrewd, because that's exactly what I would have done.

his examination revealed that he had no fever, no pain anywhere, and that his only concrete feeling was an urgent desire to die. All that was needed was shrewd questioning...to conclude once again that the symptoms of love were the same as those of cholera.

I felt unhappy and trapped. If I left baseball, where could I go, what could I do to earn enough money to help my mother and to marry Rachel? The solution to my problem was only days away in the hands of a tough, shrewd, courageous man called Branch Rickey, the president of the Brooklyn Dodgers.

If you make a strange, eccentric record - like the Velvet Underground's 'White Light/White Heat' - it takes on its own mood because it's less about a shrewd marketing plan; it's more about an individual emotion.

Sometimes I wish I was more shrewd.

My dad's a very shrewd, clever guy.

The Church must be intelligible to the simple as well as to the shrewd.

I find that the Amazon comments often are exceptionally shrewd and insightful, so I'm not going to diss them. But you don't really have any guarantees that what you're reading wasn't written out of friendship or spite.

King Shrewd is expecting me, rather he isn't expecting me, and that is precisely why I must go to him now.

By means of shrewd lies, unremittingly repeated, it is possible to make people believe that heaven is hell - and hell heaven. The greater the lie, the more readily it will be believed.

If we would have anything of benefit, we must earn it, and earning it become shrewd, inventive, ingenious, active, enterprising.

They made a shrewd guess that I could give them some useful information, and they were the first to meet me. Some one said they came to arrest me, and - well, let it go at that.

With its shrewd analysis and its knowledgeable reflections on the state of the arts, as well as a rich array of anecdotes and quotations about patronage, Patronizing the Arts will appeal to a broad audience.

My father, being a Scotsman, taught me to look after finances. I'm shrewd. Some people may call me tight.

The very cunning conceal their cunning; the indifferently shrewd boast of it.

One must be just a little crazy to write a great novel. One must be capable of allowing the darkest, most ancient and shrewd parts of one’s being to take over the work from time to time.

Humour very often consists of shrewd perceptions about people. It's usually fun at someone's expense. Nowadays if you're funny at anybody's expense they run to the UN and say, "I must have an ombudsman to protect me." You hardly dare have a shrewd perception about anybody.

A shrewd person would one day start a religion based on coincidence, if he hasn't already, and make a million.

What I'm saying is that there are bargains right now, there are stocks right now that if you're shrewd enough, you will be able to buy them at the opening today and I you'll make money in a year from now.

No man should tell a lie unless he is shrewd enough to recognize the time for renouncing it, if and when it comes, and knows how to renounce it gracefully.

The big Wall Street firms, seemingly so shrewd and self-interested, had somehow become the dumb money. The people who ran them did not understand their own businesses, and their regulators obviously knew even less.