J Edgar Hoover Quotes

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.

[ 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.