- Claire Underwood: [to the camera for the first time ever] Just to be clear, it's not that I haven't always known you were there. It's that I have mixed feelings about you. I question your intentions and I'm ambivalent about attention. But don't take it personally. It's how I feel about most everybody.
- Francis Underwood: Were the men before us any more moral? Any more worthy of the power and position that they had found themselves in? Any more capable of doing a single goddamn thing for the public? Well, yes and no. History has a way of looking better than it was. Or perhaps Shakespeare was right. We're all just madmen leading the blind.