Quotes About Politics

Liberalism itself has failed, and for a pretty good reason. It has been too often compromised by the people who represented it.

Some book reviewer whose name I forget recently called me a 'vicious misanthrope' . . . or maybe it was a 'cynical misanthrope'. . . but either way, he (or she) was right; and what got me this way was politics .

And the whole Bush family, from Texas, should be boiled in poisoned oil.

Consciousness Expansion" went out with LBJ … and it is worth noting, historically, that downers came in with Nixon.

You people voted for Hubert Humphrey and killed Jesus!

If we start electing presidents on the basis of their sexual purity, some real monsters will get into the White House.

ROSS PEROT was the best thing that happened in American politics since Richard Nixon acquired a taste for gin. In both cases, the political dialogue of the day was enriched by spontaneous gibberish that entertained the wrong people and made the right ones question their faith.

NOT EVERYBODY is comfortable with the idea that politics is a guilty addiction. But it is. They are addicts, and they are guilty and they do lie and cheat and steal—like all junkies. And when they get in a frenzy, they will sacrifice anything and anybody to feed their cruel and stupid habit, and there is no cure for it.

The root assumption here is that neither party would nominate a man more than 20 percent different from the type of person most Americans consider basically right and acceptable. Which almost always happens. There is no potentially serious candidate in either major party this year who couldn't pass for the executive vice-president for mortgage loans in any hometown bank from Bangor to San Diego. We

Humphrey will go into a black neighborhood in Milwaukee and drench the streets with tears while deploring "the enduring tragedy" that life in Nixon's America has visited on "these beautiful little children"—and then act hurt and dismayed when a reporter who covered his Florida campaign reminds him that "In Miami you were talking just a shade to the Left of George Wallace and somewhere to the Right of Mussolini." Hubert

Every now and then you have to get away from that ugly Old Politics trip, or it will drive you to kicking the walls and hurling AR3's into the fireplace.

Nixon stabbed his Enemies in the back, but Clinton did it to his Friends. His lust to inflict Punishment surpassed even Nixon's, and he put more people in prison than Caligula. He had his own brother locked up & he refused to pardon his old friend Webb Hubbell.… Richard Nixon was a criminally insane Monster; Bill Clinton is a black-hearted Swine of a friend.

Real happiness, in politics, is a wide-open hammer shot on some poor bastard who knows he's been trapped, but can't flee.

The prevailing quality of life in America -- by any accepted methods of measuring -- was unarguably freer and more politically open under Nixon than it is today in this evil year of Our Lord 2002.

A week earlier I'd been locked into the idea that the Redskins would win easily -- but when Nixon came out for them and George Allen began televising his prayer meetings I decided that any team with both God and Nixon on their side was fucked from start.

Hubert Humphrey is a treacherous, gutless old ward-heeler who should be put in a goddamn bottle and sent out with the Japanese current.

Even now, more than 30 years later, I still judge people on the basis of whether they voted for Jack Kennedy in 1960, or for Richard Nixon...Those bastards are scarred forever, and I'm not. At least not for that. Hell, it was an honor to be able to vote against Richard Nixon - and it will be an honor on November 3 [1992] to vote against George Bush and everything he stands for.

You have to be very mean to get a laugh on the campaign trail. There is no such thing as paranoia.

Sending Muskie against Nixon would have been like sending a three-toed sloth out to seize turf from a wolverine.

And how many more of these stinking, double-downer sideshows will we have to go through before we can get ourselves straight enough to put together some kind of national election that will give me and the at least 20 million people I tend to agree with a chance to vote for something, instead of always being faced with that old familiar choice between the lesser of two evils? I

It was like a scene from the final hours of the Roman Empire: Everywhere you looked, some prominent politician was degrading himself in public.

McGovern is the only major candidate—including Lindsay and Muskie—who invariably gives a straight answer when people raise these questions. He lines out the painful truth, and his reward has been just about the same as that of any other politician who insists on telling the truth: He is mocked, vilified, ignored, and abandoned as a hopeless loser by even his good old buddies like Harold Hughes. On

Young George spent more money on one day of his Inauguration Ceremonies than Richard Nixon did on his whole Campaign in 1972—and Nixon was crucified as a Criminal Spendthrift with the ethics of a snake.

When Nixon went into New Hampshire, he was viewed by the pros as just another of these stubborn, right-wing waterheads with nothing better to do.