Quotes About Politics

Politics is a story about the relationship between the past and the future; history is a story about the relationship between the past and the present. It's what history and politics share - a vantage on the past - that makes writing the history of politics fraught. And it's what they don't share that makes the study of history vital. Politics is accountable to opinion; history is accountable to evidence.

We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country. —Abraham Lincoln, 1862

The Electoral College was a concession to slave owners, an affair of both mathematical and political calculation.

It would become politically expedient, after the war, for ex-Confederates to insist that the Confederacy was founded on states' rights. But the Confederacy was founded on white supremacy.

By the 1980s, influenced by the psychology and popular culture of trauma, the Left had abandoned solidarity across difference in favor of the meditation on and expression of suffering, a politics of feeling and resentment, of self and sensitivity. The Right, if it didn't describe itself as engaging in identity politics, adopted the same model: the NRA, notably, cultivated the resentments and grievances of white men

Liberalism is still in there. The trick is getting it out. There's only one way to do that. It requires grabbing and holding onto a very good idea: that all people are equal and endowed from birth with inalienable rights and entitled to equal treatment, guaranteed by a nation of laws. This requires making the case for the nation.

It seems to me unthinkable that a man with his background of slander, abuse, innuendo, expediency and resort to all the most devious political devices should ever occupy an office which we have tried for generations to exalt in the esteem of young people and the world

One debate merged religion and politics. What were the political consequences of the idea of the equality of souls? Could the soul of America be redeemed from the nation's original sin, the Constitution's sanctioning of slavery?

Another debate merged politics and technology. Could the nation's new democratic traditions survive in the

In 1952, Republicans spent $1.5 million on television advertising to the Democrats' puny $77,000.

This is the propagandist's opportunity," Lippmann wrote.156 With enough money, and with the tools of mass communication, deployed efficiently, the propagandist can turn a political majority into a truth.

If the United States were to acquire territory from Mexico, and if this territory were to enter the Union, would Mexicans become American citizens? Calhoun, now in the Senate, vehemently opposed this idea. "I protest against the incorporation of such a people," he declared. "Ours is the government of the white man.

Between 1978 and 1984, pro-life Democrats and pro-choice Republicans were purged from their parties.

The Constitution threatens to be a subject of infinite sects, like the Bible." And, as with many sects, those politicians who most strenuously staked their arguments on the Constitution often appeared the least acquainted with it.

Men of factious tempers, of local prejudices, or of sinister designs may, by intrigue, by corruption, or by other means, first obtain the suffrages, and then betray the interests, of the people," James Madison warned in 1787.

You know something, Stu?' Reagan said to Stuart Spencer. 'Politics is just like show business... You begin with a hell of an opening, you coast for a while, & you end with a hell of a closing.

In the waning decades of the twentieth century, liberals and conservatives alike cast the lingering divisions of the 1960s less as matters of law and order than as matters of life and death. Either abortion was murder and guns meant freedom or guns meant murder and abortion was freedom. How this sorted out came to depend upon party affiliation.

Pretend that you are the Voice of the People. Whitaker and Baxter bought radio ads, sponsored by "the Citizens Committee Against the Recall," in which an ominous voice said: "The real issue is whether the City Hall is to be turned over, lock, stock, and barrel, to an unholy alliance fronting for a faceless man." (The recall was defeated.) Attack, attack, attack. Said Whitaker: "You can't wage a defensive campaign and win!" Never underestimate

In 2003, the United States invaded a country that did not threaten us, did not attack us, and did not want war with us, to disarm it of weapons we have since discovered it did not have," wrote Pat Buchanan, placing the blame for the war on the neocons' hijacking of the conservative movement

POPULISTS' GRIEVANCES WERE many, and bitter. Their best-founded objection was their concern about the federal government's support of the interests of businesses over those of labor.

Nearly as soon as the war with Mexico began, members of Congress began debating what to do when it ended. They spat venom. They pulled guns. They unsheathed knives. Divisions of party were abandoned; the splinter in Congress was sectional. Before heading to the Capitol every morning, southern congressmen strapped bowie knives to their belts and tucked pistols into their pockets. Northerners, on principle, came unarmed.

One Republican said, "I felt that Bryan was the first politician I had ever heard speak the truth and nothing but the truth," even though in every case, when he read a transcript of the speech in the newspaper the next day, he "disagreed with almost all of it.

It certainly wasn't the chronicle of a king. The yere of our Lord 1537 was a prince born to king Harry th'eight. It was, instead, the story of a poor boy who learns to read and comes to know as much of politics as a prince. This

The democratization of American politics was hastened by revivalists like Stewart who believed in the salvation of the individual through good works and in the equality of all people in the eyes of God. Against that belief stood the stark and brutal realities of an industrializing age, the grinding of souls.