Quotes About Politics

While all other sciences have advanced, that of government is at a standstill - little better understood, little better practiced now than three or four thousand years ago.

Compromise makes a good umbrella, but a poor roof; it is temporary expedient, often wise in party politics, almost sure to be unwise in statesmanship.

Communists liked history very much. It just had to be the right history. They liked to remember it selectively.

I now announce myself as candidate for the Presidency. I anticipate criticism but however unfavorable I trust that my sincerity will not be called into question.

Like a shark who must keep swimming to live, a politician... had to keep his lips constantly moving.

The word that identified what we did not possess was "money," . . . The other word was "votes," so that together "money votes" was "open sesame" to the deep caverns of the American political system.

Like a shark who must keep swimming to live, a politician—which was what the General had become—had to keep his lips constantly moving.

Forgive me. I'm talking politics again. I swear not to talk about politics tonight, my brother. You know how hard that is for someone who believes everything is political.

part spy thriller, part cultural and political reclamation, The Sympathizer

slogans were empty suits draped on the corpse of an idea?

The majority of Americans regarded us with ambivalence if not outright distaste, we being living reminders of their stinging defeat. We threatened the sanctity and symmetry of a white and black America whose yin and yang racial politics left no room for any other color, particularly that of pathetic little yellow-skinned people pickpocketing the American purse.

By the time I returned to campus, however, the students were of a new breed, not interested in politics or the world like the previous generation. Their tender eyes were no longer exposed daily to stories and pictures of atrocity and terror for which they might have felt responsible, given that they were citizens of a democracy destroying another country in order to save it.

But I was also one of those unfortunate cases who could not help but wonder whether my need for American charity was due to my having first been the recipient of American aid," or so I wrote in my novel The Sympathizer. I am a bad refugee, you see, who can't help but see that my good fortune is a stroke of bureaucratic luck and the racial politics of the United States, where Asians are considered model minorities.

The Communists are evil. They don't believe in God and they don't believe in money.

Some bemoan the brutalism of socialist architecture, but was the blandness of capitalist architecture any better?

There is that old joke. Why is there never a coup in the United States? Because there is no US embassy there.

Congress is where the liars and thieves meet.

He says it while Churchill is rejoicing war will not come

For a very long time, and among a large number of peoples, political power has belonged to the owners of the land.

And humility in politics means accepting that one party doesn't have all the answers recognising that working in partnership is progress not treachery.

My college, Fitzwilliam, was pretty good but unfashionable and I lived in digs so I was not part of the cloistered 'old college' environment, which frankly was a bit intimidating. But I worked hard and settled in by exploring politics and girls.

You can't win with some people. If you're not in government, you're criticised for being not serious. If you are in government, you're criticised for wanting power. That's the Labour party's line of attack, and it's a bit ridiculous.

The number of elected officials who were willing to put the good of the country ahead of their own ego, and the success of their political party, was minuscule.

The Florida Supreme Court wanted all the legal votes to be counted. The United States Supreme Court, on the other hand, did not want all the votes to be counted.