# Roger Stone — "Admit nothing, deny everything, launch counterattack" > [!quote] "Attack, attack, attack — never defend. … Admit nothing, deny everything, launch counterattack." > — Roger Stone, "Stone's Rules" ## Context This is the best-known of "Stone's Rules," the self-mythologizing maxims [[Roger Stone]] has repeated across decades of interviews — notably to The New Yorker's Jeffrey Toobin in 2008. Stone credits a version of the "admit nothing" formula to Lee Atwater and Richard Nixon-era hardball, and he ran it himself when facing his own 2019 prosecution. It is the doctrinal core of his [[Dirty Tricks]] practice. ## Why this matters This is the operational creed of modern right-wing crisis management, and it has scaled far beyond Stone. "Never defend, always counterattack" describes a now-standard posture in which an accusation is met not with rebuttal but with aggression aimed at the accuser — collapsing the distinction between defense and offense. Stone is the through-line from Nixon's dirty-tricks tradition to the Trump-era information environment, and this rule is the portable strategy he carried across that span. A foundational receipt for the [[Dirty Tricks]] lineage and the "flood the zone" sensibility it anticipates. ## Verification - **Source:** [The New Yorker, "The Dirty Trickster," June 2008](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2008/06/02/the-dirty-trickster); reprised in [The Washington Post, December 2021](https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/12/17/admit-nothing-deny-everything-launch-counterattack/). - **Status:** Verbatim and repeatedly self-affirmed; Stone markets these as his own rules. ## Related quotes - [[Roger Stone - hate is a stronger motivator than love]] — the affective premise beneath the tactics. - [[Roger Stone - politics is about dividing people]] — the strategic goal the tactics serve.