Quotes About Politics

I grew up around politics. I organized my first campaign when I was 14, a walk-out in my high school to protest the year-round school schedule.

After four years at the United Nations I sometimes yearn for the peace and tranquility of a political convention.

If the Tories and Lib Dems fought together, they'd keep their ministerial offices and limousines, and continue to do the right things for the U.K. But too many backbenchers in both parties yearn for Opposition, preferring hallucinogenic ideological purity and political irrelevance to the mucky reality of governing.

People are yearning for a politics that tells it straight: that being in government is difficult, that there are tough decisions that we have to make sometimes.

Presidential aspirants reach for the highest office to satisfy some yearning for greatness or even immortality.

Enter the candidates on horseback: While military leaders can sometimes be dangerous in politics, our best generals and admirals embody the democratic values and leadership skills for which the country is yearning.

All political thinking for years past has been vitiated in the same way. People can foresee the future only when it coincides with their own wishes, and the most grossly obvious facts can be ignored when they are unwelcome.

I worked night and day for twelve years to prevent the war, but I could not. The North was mad and blind, would not let us govern ourselves, and so the war came.

My election only proves that the citizens are tired of the experienced politicians who over the past 28 years created a country of opportunities - opportunities to steal, bribe and loot.

'Get along, go along' is not an inspirational philosophy, and only God knows how much moral cowardice it has covered up over the years. Serve your time, collect your chits, and cash 'em in for your home state? No, I'd say we could ask for more than that from our senators.

The Wall will be standing in 50 and even in 100 years, if the reasons for it are not removed.

There's something fundamentally wrong with a system where there's been 17 years of a Tory Government and the people of Scotland have voted Socialist for 17 years. That hardly seems democratic.

As a matter of fact, I didn't make a political speech outside of my state for 20 years.

The oppressed are allowed once every few years to decide which particular representatives of the oppressing class are to represent and repress them in parliament.

You can fool some of the people all of the time and all of the people some of the time, but you can only make a monkey out of the voters every four years!

We used to fight for democracy. Democracy used to matter. We now treat it with contempt. We have turned our backs on values that we built up over hundreds of years, for the benefit of politicians in Europe. To me, that is heartbreaking.

Few expected very much of Franklin Roosevelt on Inauguration Day in 1933. Like Barack Obama seventy-six years later, he was succeeding a failed Republican president, and Americans had voted for change. What that change might be Roosevelt never clearly said, probably because he himself didn't know.

I think that both parties should declare the debt limit as a political weapon of mass destruction which can't be used. I mean, it is silly to have a country that has 237 years building up its reputation and then have people threaten to tear it down because they're not getting some other matter.

Most of the women who have offered themselves for public office over the years have done so, I believe, more because of the 'dirt' than in spite of it.

On account of being a democracy and run by the people, we are the only nation in the world that has to keep a government four years, no matter what it does.

I mean, Donald Trump has been able, because of Mitch McConnell, to seat more circuit court judges almost than Barack Obama did in eight years.

I want to say this about my state. When Strom Thurmond ran for president, we voted for him. We're proud of it. And if the rest of the country had followed our lead, we wouldn't have had all these problems over all these years either.

We should not underestimate that: the Chinese people's ignorance. Thousands of years of despotism had been such a poison that their understanding of modern politics is even inferior to that of the black slaves and other immigrants.

The philosophy of individualism owes a great deal to the tradition of novel-writing and novel-reading. In its development and in its aesthetics, the novel is not politically neutral; it has been a participant in history all along.