Quotes About Politics

There's a rift in this country between the people and its leaders. There is corruption at the highest levels of government; it goes beyond mere power politics. The Constitution has been seriously assaulted, our way of life threatened.

And then, after publication of Bob Woodward's book Obama's Wars

I took a telephone call from Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. He told me that he was the one who had talked Obama into running for president (a lot of people were claiming that) but there was no candidate for vice president. Reid said he was thinking about me, and that was the reason for the call. It took a lot of willpower for me to keep from bursting out laughing.

We have a long tradition in America of electing a president, celebrating him for a few days, and then spending four or eight years demonizing him, reviling him, or blindly defending him.

wanted to come right out of my chair at the witness table and scream, You guys have been in business for over two hundred years and can't pass routine legislation. How can you be so impatient with a bunch of parliamentarians who've been at it a year after four thousand years of dictatorship?

Robert M. Gates

others—angled for oil contracts and

As in the spring with "Don't Ask, Don't Tell," I felt that agreements with the Obama White House were good for only as long as they were politically convenient.

After all, one wouldn't want facts and reality—not to mention the national interest—to intrude upon partisan politics, would one?

The president said he would think about what I had said. Then he shocked me as the breakfast ended by saying that he wished he'd made the change in secretary of defense "a couple of years earlier." It was the only thing I ever heard him say even indirectly critical of Rumsfeld.

Harry Truman's line that if you want a friend in Washington, buy a dog.)

For my own job, my short list included Hillary, Colin Powell, Panetta, and New York mayor Michael Bloomberg.

As I said earlier, for the first several months under Obama, it took a lot of discipline to sit quietly at the table as everyone from the president on down took shots at Bush and his team. Sitting there, I would often think to myself, Am I invisible? During those excoriations, there was never any acknowledgment that I had been an integral part of that earlier team.

Thus political orientation about social issues reflects sensitivity to visceral disgust and strategies for coping with such disgust.

But it wasn't a Primary. It was hell among the yearlings and the Charge of the Light Brigade and Saturday night in the backroom of Casey's Saloon rolled into one, and when the smoke cleared away not a picture still hung on the walls. And there wasn't any Democratic Party. There was just Willie, with his hair in his eyes, and his shirt sticking to his stomach with sweat. And he had a meat ax in his hand and was screaming for blood.

That old unionism was, however, very different from the kind we live with now. We do not live with an ideal, sometimes on the defensive, of union. We live with the overriding, overwhelming fact, a fact so technologically, economically, and politically validated that we usually forget to ask how fully this fact represents a true community, the spiritually significant communion which the old romantic unionism had envisaged.

Politics is action and all action is but a flaw in the perfection of inaction, which is peace, just as all being is but a flaw in the perfection of nonbeing. Which is God. For if God is perfection and the only perfection is in nonbeing, then God is nonbeing. Then God is nothing. Nothing can give no basis for the criticism of Thing in its thingness. Then where do you get anything to say? Then where do you get off?

The struggle for power conducted along logical lines is much more likely to occur in smoke-filled rooms than at the polls. The party system is a grid, a filter, a meat chopper, through which issues are processed for the consuming public. The Civil War confirmed our preference for this arrangement. We like the fog of politics, with the occasional drama of the flash of a lightning bolt that, happily, is usually nothing more than a near miss.

Words unconsciously shift thoughts and feelings. One person's 'terrorist' is another's 'freedom fighter'; politicians jockey to commandeer 'family values,' and somehow you can't favor both 'choice' and 'life'.

Keynes rejected Labour's anti-élitism. He felt that the intellectual elements in the Labour party will '[n]ever exercise adequate control; too much will always be decided by those who do not know at all what they are talking about'. The Conservatives were much better off in this respect, since 'the inner ring of the party can almost dictate the details and the technique of policy'.

The problem was that the government's appetite for money was so great that taxes soon needed to be levied on the middle class, and from there it kept trickling down.

El problema no es político. A Mayer Amschel Rothschild (1744-1812), fundador del Banco Rothschild, se le atribuye la siguiente frase: "Denme el control del dinero de una nación y no me importará quién haga las leyes.

When you get a raise, so does the government.

It took approximately 50 years in both England and the United States to sell the idea of a regular income tax.