Quotes from Theodore H. White

The flood of money that gushes into politics today is a pollution of democracy.

The job of intellectuals is to come up with ideas, and all we've been producing is footnotes.

Quality - in its classic Greek sense - how to live with grace and intelligence, with bravery and mercy.

The flood of money that gushes into politics today is a pollution of democracy.

To go against the dominant thinking of your friends, of most of the people you see every day, is perhaps the most difficult act of heroism you can have.

Every American election summons the individual voter to weigh the past against the future.

A genuine primary is a fight within the family of the party - and, like any family fight, is apt to be more bitter and leave more enduring wounds than battle with the November enemy.

In politics, the things that do not happen are frequently as significant as those that do.

The most difficult thing in the world is to know how to do a thing and to watch someone else do it wrong without comment

I have decided that I will test my ability … in the fires of the primaries and not just in the smoke-filled rooms of Miami Beach.

In the politics of consent, no victory is ever permanent unless the victor makes it firm on a base of persuasion.

All men who run for presidency of the United States are amateurs; there is no way of becoming a professional at it, and all of them, win or lose, are forever altered in spirit of character by the ordeal.

Professionals in a campaign are servants; they can tell him only how to do something once he tells them what it is he wants to do.

The 'smoke-filled room' as political reality is now as dead as Prohibition.

The Americans of the age were not an irreligious people; and the fact that they were Christian was very important, for the marks of Christianity lay all across the Constitution.

The development of an image is a mysterious thing: once a public figure has been cast in a public role, it is almost impossible for him to change the character. It is as if someone has assembled personality traits into a convenient pattern, no writer ever re-examines it: it is easier to use the accepted pattern.

Perhaps the book's greatest weakness is its romantic depiction of President Kennedy as a kind of knight in shining armor.

But if America falters in greatness and purpose, than Americans are nothing but the offscourings and hungry of other lands.

The forces that run in American politics in our age are many and varied; they run in strange ways in our times of general education--they run in the meeting of white and black; in the nagging, daily concern for war and peace; in automation and unemployment. Yet one man must make them all clear enough for American people to vote and express their desire. He is the President.

He had always acted as if men were masters of forces, as if all things were possible for men determined in purpose and clear in thought—even the Presidency. This perhaps is what he had best learned in 1960—even though he called his own victory a "miracle." This was what he would have to cherish alone in the White House, on which an impatient world waited for miracles.

THE most hopeful adage of political folklore is: "One man plus the truth makes a majority.

Reading through the reviews, I feel as though I am witnessing a much more erudite and informed preview of the Fox News/MSNBC shouting matches of today.

Through his web of contacts in the highest levels of American business, with those corporate groups who form the bony structure of what is commonly called "the military-industrial complex, " Clifford was also absorbing another input: even the military-industrial complex was adamantly opposed to escalation.

An actor or actress in politics is very dangerous because politics exaggerate the native dramatic instinct with the intoxication of substantive command.