Quotes About Politics

Edward Rutledge, a prominent South Carolina politician, wrote in December that arming freed slaves tended "more effectually to work an eternal separation between Great Britain and the colonies than any other expedient which could possibly have been thought of.

Operation Iraqi Freedom began on March 20, 2003.

Ideas" in politics are often intuition fancy dress.

But if you admit to not having the answer to any of the problems facing the nation, why should anyone vote of your for President?" "I believe I am the best qualified to wing it." But

Governing is not a hero's profession. It is a profession of compromises.

They made strategy at 33,000 feet (on) the campaign plane.

Teddy White lamented that TV might spell the death of serious politics: to give a thoughtful response to serious questions, politician needed a good thirty seconds to ponder, but television allowed only five seconds of silence at best. DDB (ad men) found nothing to lament and the fact. They were convinced you could learn everything you needed to KNOW about a product, which in this case happens to be a human being, in half a minute – the speed not of thought but of emotion.

They campaigned on contempt for the body they sought to join.

Do Americans not hate each other enough to fantasize about killing one another, in cold blood, over political and cultural disagreements? It would be hard to argue they do not. How did Nixonland end? It has not ended yet.

Nixon was becoming a discombobulated president, politically on the run. His interior secretary, Walter Hickel, posted a letter to the president that leaked to the Washington Star: "Youth in its protest must be heard." Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and James Monroe were all young people in their day, Hickel argued; their "protests fell on deaf ears and finally led to war." (The president's response was to bulldoze the White House tennis court, beloved of Hickel.)

With the best of intentions, the reformers conflated what savage cops did in the streets with the backroom deal-making that wired the convention for Hubert Humphrey—just as Mayor Daley's police tarred peaceful McCarthy campaign bureaucrats with the rampages of the revolutionary left.

Congressmen had a use for their very own son of a bitch.

How did Nixonland end? It has not ended yet.

all alone to endorse Goldwater without a fight. "Fanatics of the Birch variety have fastened their fangs on the Republican Party's flanks," Nelligan told reporters, "and are hanging on like grim death.

The main character in Nixonland is not Richard Nixon. Its protagonist, in fact, has no name--but lives on every page. It is the voter who, in 1964, pulled the lever for the Democrat for president because to do anything else, at least that particular Tuesday in November, seemed to court civilizational chaos, and who, eight years later, pulled the lever for the Republican for exactly the same reason.

Nixonland is what happens when these two groups try to occupy a country together. By the end of the 1960s, Nixonland came to encompass the entire political culture of the United States. It would, in fact, for the next fifty years.

world run according to the Gospel of Richard Nixon, where good guys were always good no matter what they actually did, bad guys were always and everywhere ontologically evil, and no one will be safe until " 'we' crack down on 'them,' occasionally adopting their tactics.

People want to believe. Ronald Reagan was able to make people believe.

Rockefeller needed Molitor.

A candidate with no experience they would package as a citizen politician, a lifetime hack as an elder statesman.

Goldwater had never even considered a non-Arizonan. Like a man on his deathbed, he wanted to be surrounded only by friends.

Almost alone among successful politicians, he took slights personally.

An anti-politician is hardly an anti-politician once he starts winning and works to close the deal by working to sew up the Establishment.

H. L. Mencken: no one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people.