Quotes About Politics

One has to be a lowbrow, a bit of a murderer, to be a politician, ready and willing to see people sacrificed, slaughtered, for the sake of an idea, whether a good one or a bad one.

I felt free and chained at the same time - like one feels just before election, when all the crooks have been nominated and you are beseeched to vote for the right man.

One-dimensional thought is systematically promoted by the makers of politics and their purveyors of mass information. Their universe of discourse is populated by self-validating hypotheses which, incessantly and monopolistically repeated, become hyponotic definitions of dictations.

All Socialism Involves Slavery.

I remember Dick Russell used to say to beware of any man who will demagogue behind closed doors.

For some reason, a lot of folks seem to think that until very recently every Southern politician would go home at night, wait for it to get dark, take a white sheet out of his closet, and then go tearing around the countryside, burning crosses and raising hell.

The problem with trying to leave politics is that once it gets in your blood, it can be like a narcotic. You know that it's no good for you, even that it's killing you, but you just can't leave it alone.

Many men have a passion for food or drink or sex or making money. For Lyndon [Johnson] it was politics. It was his natural element, what literally kept him alive.

To this day it's hard to believe that a politician as smart as Dick Nixon could have allowed something that stupid to happen. He had the most ability of any of the presidents I knew.

Politicians who are not contemplating early retirement usually find survival more attractive than martyrdom.

I think that 20 years ago, not too many people would imagine a meeting - interesting meeting, a substantive meeting between the General Secretary of the Communist Party of Vietnam and the President of the United States.

Libertarians are essentially what the Republicans were 30 years ago. Abraham Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan. They'd all fit more under the Libertarian label than the modern day Republican label.

Years ago nobody was elected on the economic ticket. It was either the education platform, or it was health or it was other issues. It is only recently that economic values have superceded every other human value.

I think the 24-hour news cycle has helped exaggerate the differences between the parties. You can always find someone on TV somewhere carping about something. That didn't happen 20 years ago.

Today 23 years ago dear Grandmama died. I wonder what she would have thought of a Labour Government.

Well, I think life is politics anyway. You can't ignore it, but you can go very wrong in politics. You can say what you thought 50 years ago, but maybe you're wrong today.

I came back from university thinking I knew all about politics and racism, not knowing my dad had been one of the youngest-serving Labour councillors in the town and had refused to work in South Africa years ago because of the situation there. And he's never mentioned it - you just find out. That's a real man to me. A sleeping lion.

To my great disappointment, it appears that the politics of division are making a big comeback. Many Americans share my disappointment - especially those who were filled with great hope a few years ago, when then-Senator Obama announced his candidacy in Springfield, Illinois.

For example, a man who might not have enormous charisma, who could be president 40 years ago, and who was a deserving president, I don't know that George Washington would be a president today, I don't know that Abe Lincoln would, I don't know that Roosevelt would.

Israel being condemned by the EU, which 66 years ago watched with glee as its Jews were being mass murdered. That is pretty rich.

The machinery of the democratic process is really no different today from what it was 150 years ago.

George W. Bush broke a mold four years ago: Even though he lost the popular vote, he governed as if he had won by acclamation.

Years ago I realized that maybe I made mistake, politically, when I turned a lot of that stuff down. I would go off to obscure places and make movies that six people went to see.

I've been worked over by the English press because there's an assumption that my politics are identical with my wife's, and for that matter that my wife's politics are identical with her politics of 20 years ago.