J Edgar Hoover Quotes

All my humor is based upon destruction and despair. If the whole world were tranquil, without disease and violence, I’d be standing on the breadline right in back of J. Edgar Hoover.

J. Edgar Hoover, J. Bracken Lee, J. Parnell Thomas, J. Paul Getty -- you can always tell a shithead by that initial initial.

We actually did a lot of takes on this movie [J. Edgar Hoover]. I never left the set wanting more. That's for sure. I don't know. This was a very difficult character for me and a lot of the other actors here, and at times we went and did 8 or 9 or 10 takes on a single day.

[ J. Edgar]Hoover, I'm sure, felt that he was right in everything he did and even the things that we don't like about his character.

I just kind of had my own impressions growing up with Hoover as a heroic figure in the 40s - actually the 30s, 40s, and 50s and beyond - but this was all prior to the information age so we didn't know about Hoover except what was usually in the papers, and this was fun, because this was a chance to go into it [ during filming 'J. Edgar Hoover' ]

It's interesting in this day and age to do a film about political espionage and wiretapping. I don't think that those types of secrets that J. Edgar Hoover was able to obtain and keep for such a long period of time would be possible in today's world, with the Internet and WikiLeaks.

There are so many parallels in society today [with era of J. Edgar Hoover ] that you can use, whether it's the head of a studio or the head of an organization, a major newspaper, a major factory or company, of people who stay too long, maybe, and overstay their usefulness.

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.

I'm so happy, I think I'll dress up like J. Edgar Hoover and sing show tunes.

I have great respect for the FBI, and I know that there have been some rumors lately that the FBI was disenchanted because of what we were doing in story, or doing a certain take: that's not true. Actually the FBI was tremendously enthusiastic about us doing [ J. Edgar Hoover ] film.

J. Edgar Hoover: When morals decline and good men do nothing, evil flourishes. A society unwilling to learn from past is doomed. We must never forget our history.

We're interested in complex characters and he's a complex character, [J. Edgar] Hoover. I like these types of dramas. I've made a few of them and I'm also interested in power structures so it just has elements that fascinate me, and the more you learn about Hoover, the more polarizing you realize he is.

It's an incredible education [for the movie J. Edgar Hoover] . It was like I did a college course on J. Edgar Hoover but not knowing and understanding the history and reading the books, but understanding what motivated this man was the most fascinating part of the research.

John F. Kennedy, who seized the White House from Richard Nixon in a frenzied campaign that turned a whole generation of young Americans into political junkies, got shot in the head for his efforts, murdered in Dallas by some hapless geek named Oswald who worked for either Castro, the mob, Jimmy Hoffa, the CIA, his dominatrix landlady or the odious, degenerate FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover. The list is long and crazy - maybe Marilyn Monroe's first husband fired those shots from the grassy knoll. Who knows?

There was one moment when J. Edgar Hoover and us had the same distorted lens about who we were - "a real threat," you know? He thought so and we thought so and we were buddies in that regard.

If you read any of the biographies on J. Edgar Hoover, you find that they contradict each other more than they agree. Often times, they're often told from a political perspective.

If you're a history buff, you know about J. Edgar Hoover. He was likely the most powerful man in the US. If you start reading about him, the books contradict each other constantly. I was often left with very little sense of the man personally. I had a sense of what he did and didn't do and what people disagreed about whether he did this or didn't do this or that, but I was like, "Why? Why was he doing all of this?" That was my big question.

The challenge for me was not just the prosthetic work and how to move like an older man would move, but more so how to have 50 years of experience in the workplace and talk to a young Robert F. Kennedy as if he was some political upstart that didn't know what the hell he was talking about. That was the big challenge [in the J. Edgar Hoover mоvie].

To me, you couldn't write a character like J. Edgar Hoover and have it be believable. I mean, he was a crock pot of eccentricities. We couldn't even fit all his eccentricities into [ the same named] movie.

If Congress is going to investigate baseball players about whether or not they told the truth, how can we justify giving the most powerful intelligence official, [James] Clapper, a pass? This is how J. Edgar Hoover ended up in charge of the FBI forever.

By every measure, John Kennedy's sex life was compulsive and reckless. At one level, it had clear public consequences. Knowledge of Kennedy's behavior gave FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover absolute job security, as well as the potential power to derail Kennedy's re-election had he survived assassination.

They [FBI] had a lot of clippings, a lot of articles I'd written. And to me the - the funniest one was - I had done a piece for Playboy about J. Edgar Hoover.

You know, back in the 1950s and '60s, when J. Edgar Hoover was making the FBI the respected organization it used to be, oftentimes they would find a fugitive and basically have his house surrounded, and then put out a press release saying he was on the top 10 most wanted list. And 10 minutes later, he'd be arrested.

I had not been very kind to J. Edgar Hoover. And the field agent had written on - it was sent directly to Hoover - that - the director should see this - `And, besides, Hentoff is a lousy writer.' And I thought that went a bit far.

I would far rather over-estimate the threat [imposed by the Patriot Act] and be proven wrong than to underestimate the threat and wake up one morning in a world where the 21st century's J Edgar Hoover has the power to blackmail anyone in America.