Edgar J. Hoover Quotes

It is easier to hate an enemy with much good in him than one who is all bad. We cannot hate those we despise. The Japanese had an advantage over us in that they admired us more than we admired them. They could hate us more fervently than we could hate them. The Americans are poor haters in international affairs because of their innate feeling of superiority over all foreigners. An American's hatred for a fellow American (for Hoover or Roosevelt) is far more virulent than any antipathy he can work up against foreigners. It is of interest that the backward South shows more xenophobia than the rest of the country. Should Americans begin to hate foreigners wholeheartedly, it will be an indication that they have lost confidence in their own way of life.

I didn't fight to get women out from behind vacuum cleaners to get them onto the board of Hoover.

Before the stock market crash of 1929 approximately half of all the stock sold in America was fraudulent. President Coolidge did not believe in the Federal Government interfering with business and would not interfere. His Secretary of Commerce, Herbert Hoover however was worried about the extreme corruption of the system. By the time he succeeded Coolidge as President, it was too late.

Even arch-isolationists, such as former President Herbert Hoover and Senator Robert Taft of Ohio - two of the most right-wing figures in the Republican Party - insisted on being called liberal.

Also, with information having just come out at the time about J. Edgar Hoover's electronic surveillance of Dr. King, it gave greater weight to the statements of those persons who were alleging involvement of the FBI.

Roosevelt, never let Hoover near the White House and they never liked each other. Hoover didn't speak to Roosevelt when they were riding down the avenue, you know.

I'm about as Chinese as Herbert Hoover.

There were too many lawmen who were Klansmen. The Hoover FBI was not the least bit interested in what I could tell them about the Klan. So I went to Drew Pearson who had a coast to coast radio program and gave him the names of people who were Klan members and attended meetings. He read some names each week, and those men never showed up again.

By 1967, J. Edgar Hoover had concluded that the Black Panther Party had replaced the Communist Party as the gravest threat to national security.

To be sure, anonymity online has it uses and is very important. Governments hoover up people's telephone and e-mail records without oversight, and companies track astonishingly granular personal information.

I was working with Bryan Cranston in 'All the Way.' We were about to make an entrance together - I was Hoover, he was LBJ - and he says to me, 'You should play the brother in 'Better Call Saul.' I was like 'What?' and it was time to go on. I'm doing the scene, and I can't think of what Hoover's supposed to say.

Let's do to Hoover what he does to others.

Herbert Hoover failed through no fault of his own. The Crash of 1929 and the Great Depression were beyond his control, and every remedy he tried failed adequately to work.

J. Edgar Hoover very famously denied the existence of organized crime up until the Appalachian Meeting, I think, in 1957. It was interesting to me that he clearly had to know that there was such a thing as organized crime and organized criminals as far back as the '20s.

I have one anecdote about the FBI breaking into an embassy in Washington, and under Hoover, they had this sort of ruse whereby they didn't want to recommend a break-in that might be a big flap and cause all kinds of problems.

What the hell has [Herbert] Hoover got to do with it? Besides, I had a better year than he did.

The notion of law enforcement as professional, not political, began developing as an aspiration and an ethos even while, in practice, the FBI was the personal fiefdom of J. Edgar Hoover.

Consider my Situation: I was a forty nine year old man facing life in prison for encouraging people to face up to new options with courage and intelligence. The American government was being run by Richard Nixon, Spiro Agnew, Robert Haldeman, G. Gordon Liddy, J. Edgar Hoover and other cynical flouters of the democratic process

Why was there so much work-sharing in the 1930s? One reason is that government pushed for it. In his memoirs, President Herbert Hoover estimated that as many as two million workers avoided unemployment as a result of his efforts to promote work-sharing.

Do I think J. Edgar Hoover was gay? Yes. Do I think he cross-dressed? No.

… J. Edgar Hoover, whom you should trust as much as you would a rattlesnake with a silencer on its rattle.

All Coolidge had to do in 1924 was to keep his mean trap shut, to be elected. All Harding had to do in 1920 was repeat “Avoid foreign entanglements.” All Hoover had to do in 1928 was to endorse Coolidge. All Roosevelt had to do in 1932 was to point to Hoover.

Furthermore, and a point I really want to make very strongly, is that this is the first Administration since Herbert Hoover not to create a net gain in jobs in the course of its Administration.

I grew up with J. Edgar Hoover. He was the G-man, a hero to everybody, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation was the big, feared organization. He was ahead of his time as far as building up forensic evidence and fingerprinting. But he took down a lot of innocent people, too.

Hoover had us [FBI agents and officials] prepare material for McCarthy regularly. We kept furnishing it to him while Hoover publicly denied that we were helping him.