Quotes About Politics

The White House had decided that the conduct of the press, not the conduct of the President's men, was the issue.

election of the President (CRP) ALEXANDER P. BUTTERFIELD Deputy Assistant to the President; aide to H. R. Haldeman JOHN J. CAULFIELD Staff aide to John Ehrlichman DWIGHT L. CHAPIN Deputy Assistant to the President; appointments secretary KENNETH W. CLAWSON Deputy Director of

wir konnen warten. wissen macht frei [we can wait. knowledge liberates]. in these confident words the stalwart Ritter von Schmerling expressed the rationalistic expectations of the political process at the beginning of the liberal era in 1861. at the end of that era, the poet Hugo von Hofmannsthal, scion of a cultivated middle-class family, offered a different formula for political success: politics is magic. he who knows how to summon the forces from the deep, him will they follow.

It is too late for a politics based on law alone, too soon for a politics of grace which sublimates instinct.

Nobody with an IQ higher than emergency-room temperature could ever believe that 'death panels' would be appointed to nudge the elderly toward euthanasia. Yet for idle entertainment, it's hard to beat Sarah Palin's ignorant nattering on the subject.

as a lobbyist he had long ago concluded there was no difference in how Democrats and Republicans conducted the business of government. The game stayed the same: It was always about favors and friends, and who controlled the dough. Party labels were merely a way to keep track of the teams; issues were mostly smoke and vaudeville. Nobody believed in anything except hanging on to power, whatever it took. .....

I'm waiting for the day when Rush Limbaugh's pharmacist writes a book.

It is in the nature of political bodies always to see the evil in the opposite group, just as the individual has an ineradicable tendency to get rid of everything he does not know and does not want to know about himself by foisting it off on somebody else.

The whole damn thing started when they gave women the vote.

to putin shut up!

There's no truth in the idea that the Germans had closed ranks, or that they were terrorised by the SS and the Gestapo. Not at all: 60 per cent of the people were Nazis themselves.

On Chiang Kai-Shek: "He's a son of a bitch but he's our son of a bitch."

There was a revealing moment in the first presidential debate in September 2008, moderator Jim Lehrer asked the candidates, ''Are you willing to acknowledge, both of this financial crisis is going to affect the way you rule the country as president of the States?''Neither McCain nor Obama objected to Lehrer's phrasing. Both, it seemed, perfectly comfortable with the idea that it's the president's job to ''rule the country.

The tendency to support enhanced executive power when one's friends hold the executive branch—a syndrome aptly dubbed ''Situational Constitutionalism''— is a recurring theme of this book.

get enough seniority to get good things done but to keep your head low enough to avoid the political battles that make you inherently vulnerable.

but to keep your head low enough to avoid the political battles that make you inherently vulnerable. I have absolutely no interest in becoming one of the vps who just give each other PowerPoints all day long.

The problems will be mostly resolved once everyone understands how cities and farms are parts of a whole, not divisible one from another. When we all realize that, as we munch our good, fresh food, it will not only mean a better environment for all, but the end to this silly political anger that colors everything blue or red instead of a lovely productive green. Another

I have never lied about my relationship with Bill Clinton. The only proven liar, at this point, and the only admitted liar, is Bill Clinton not Gennifer Flowers, not Kathleen Willey, not Paula Jones and not Monica Lewinsky, at this point. He is the only proven liar.

One study of twenty years of data in the United States concluded that "the preferences of the average American appear to have only a minuscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy."4

Democracy is a freak condition in the world's history: civil liberties are not common liberties even today, and most people in the world have never possessed them.

In economics, as in politics, no national reservoir can stand the strain when everyone is turning on the taps and few are bothering to see that the catchments to the reservoir are working.

In Italy the chairman of the Film Commission, Admiral Stone, began a meeting by roundly declaring that Italy, as a rural and former Fascist country, did not need a film industry and should not be allowed to have one.[...] Neo-realism signalled an affirmation by Italian film-makers that they could create a cinema whose aesthetic (and political) assumptions were opposed in equal measure to those of Hollywood and of Italy's own cinema in the Fascist period.

The English language is shot through with idioms and expressions which allude to violence without inciting it, most of which pass without notice unless they're called to your attention. One of the most disingenuous moves in the incivility wars is to treat these expressions with a specious literalism; politics makes Freudians of us all. (205)

Churchill that he had a great many military ideas, most of them likewise bad.