Quotes About Politics

But the same "personal charm" that had propelled Taft to the presidency ultimately proved "dangerous" to him, Baker concluded. For far too long, his amiable nature had kept him from the rough-and-tumble of politics, from the need to fight for himself and his convictions. Had he come into the White House

Frances, who also was feeling distant from her husband. Though still deeply in love after ten years of marriage, Frances worried that her husband's passion for politics and worldly achievement surpassed his love for his family. She mourned "losing my influence over a heart I once thought so entirely my own," increasingly apprehensive that she and her husband were "differently constituted.

The Know Nothings fought to delay citizenship for the new immigrants and bar them from voting.

Still, slander against the president and first lady continued to fill the columns of opposition papers.

Abraham Lincoln would maintain that he had never been in favor "of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry.

became postmaster general, and Edwin M. Stanton, Lincoln's "Mars," eventually became secretary

When asked years later why Lincoln had won, he said: "The leader of a political party in a country like ours is so exposed that his enemies become as numerous and formidable as his friends.

It soon became clear, however, that Abraham Lincoln would emerge the undisputed captain of this most unusual cabinet, truly a team of rivals. The powerful competitors who had originally disdained Lincoln became colleagues who helped him steer the country through its darkest days. Seward

As governor general of the Philippines, Taft had welcomed every political group at Malacañan Palace, making it "a rule never to pay any attention to personal squabbles and differences.

Each party profited by the offices when in power," Roosevelt explained, "and when in opposition each party insincerely denounced its opponents for doing exactly what it itself had done and intended again to do.

I don't know that I will ever make a political speech again." Would he care to qualify that statement? one reporter queried. "Yes," Roosevelt laughingly said. "I won't say never.

The vice presidency "ought to be abolished," he told his friend Leonard Wood. "The man who occupies it may at any moment be everything; but meanwhile he is practically nothing.

Lincoln, considering a Cabinet nominee: He is a Radical without the petulance and fretfulness of many radicals.

His experience taught him what every party boss has understood through the ages: the practical machinery of the party organization—the distribution of ballots, the checklists, the rounding up of voters—was as crucial as the broad ideology laid out in the platform. The same intimate involvement in campaign organization that he displayed in these early years would characterize all of Lincoln's future campaigns.

They were stealin' votes in east Texas," Johnson supporter and Austin mayor Tom Miller recalled, "we were stealin' votes in south Texas, only Jesus Christ could say who actually won it." But Jesus wasn't counting, and, by an eighty-seven-vote margin, "Landslide Lyndon" attained the Senate seat he had coveted for so long.

Two giant strides toward Lincoln's ascension to the presidency were, ironically, his two failed efforts, in 1855 and 1858, to become the U.S. senator from Illinois.

The bullet that rests in Roosevelt's chest has killed Wilson for the Presidency," one Democratic speaker suspected.

Fearing that Taft would be too reticent on the stump, Roosevelt barraged him with incessant advice. "Do not answer Bryan; attack him!" he counseled in early September, adding, "Don't let him make the issues.

With public sentiment, nothing can fail," Abraham Lincoln said, "without it nothing can succeed.

He cannot speak clearly if his words must be strained through a Congressional gag.

The biggest danger to American stability," Johnson argued, "is the politics of principle, which brings out the masses in irrational fights for unlimited goals, for once the masses begin to move, then the whole thing begins to explode. Thus it is for the sake of nothing less than stability that I consider myself a consensus man.

The choice of Blaine "speaks badly for the intelligence of the mass of my party," he ruefully continued. "It may be that 'the voice of the people is the voice of God' in fifty one cases out of a hundred; but in the remaining forty nine it is quite as likely to be the voice of the devil, or, what is still worse, the voice of a fool." Still

Once Roosevelt had agreed to be drafted and assumed the responsibility of running for governor, he was in it for keeps. "When you're in politics you have to play the game," he told a friend.

At this introductory stage of his career, Roosevelt viewed politics in a puritanical light, as an arena where good battled evil. He had seen his father's dreams of high office undone by corruption; he had absorbed his father's warning that the country could not much longer stand "so corrupt a government.