Quotes About Politics

Between Sartre and any given problem in politics there has always stood the United States. There are in the world two superpowers, but only one has seemed to him positively evil. When he discussed the Middle East, his first concern as a friend of Israel was to dissociate Israel from American interests.

However, the Arabs themselves have put Israel into a position in which she is "condemned—militarily and economically—to depend not on the governments of the imperialist states but on the Jewish minorities of those states, who to a large extent support the politics of those states.

Action comes from keeping the heat on. No politician can sit on a hot issue if you make it hot enough.

Political realists see the world as it is: an arena of power politics moved primarily by perceived immediate self-interests, where morality is rhetorical rationale for expedient action and self-interest.

When politicians tell lies, they know the press will call them out. They also know it doesn't matter. Politicians understand that reason will never have much of a role in voting decisions. A lie that makes a voter feel good is more effective than a hundred rational arguments. That's even true when the voter knows the lie is a lie.

A lie that makes a voter feel good is more effective than a hundred rational arguments.

You know you're in a bureaucracy when a hundred people who think 'A' get together and compromise on 'B.

When Trump said he would deport millions of undocumented immigrants who were otherwise obeying the law, his critics saw it as the beginning of a Hitler-like roundup of the people who are "different" in some way. I saw it as a thoroughly impractical idea that served as a mental "anchor" to brand Trump as the candidate who cared the most about our porous borders and planned to do the most about them.

When candidate Trump answered questions about policies, it was clear he didn't have a detailed understanding of the more complicated issues. Most observers saw this as a fatal flaw that would keep him out of the White House. I didn't see it that way. I saw it as Trump recognizing that people don't use facts and reason to make decisions. A skilled persuader can blatantly ignore facts and policy details so long as the persuasion is skillful.

So I announced my decision to endorse Hillary Clinton, while making it clear I was only doing it for my personal safety. People laughed. They assumed I was joking. But I stuck to my endorsement, mentioning it often, and always appending "for my safety" to the end as an explanation. I wasn't joking. I was quite serious about trying to lower my risk. The number of people on Twitter accusing me of being Goebbels slowed to a trickle almost immediately.

Here's an example of why the idea that humans are rational is pure nonsense. One of my Twitter followers copied President Trump's inauguration speech and showed it to a "leftist friend," telling him it was President Obama's speech. His friend loved it.

While Trump was talking about the wall, Senator Rand Paul—one of Trump's Republican primary challengers—had a number of smart ideas that got no traction whatsoever. Paul presented his ideas as concepts without visuals. They died on arrival.

It wasn't just the British foreign secretary whose time was taken up dealing with such things, but the foreign ministers—and in many cases, the prime ministers and presidents and kings—of all the powers, and often over struggles even less significant than that which entangled Curt Prüfer. Amid this din of complaint and trivial offense, how to know what really mattered, how to identify the true crisis when it came along?

Democracy and the rule of law are much more fragile than most Americans realize.

And what can we conclude from this lesson, Your Highness? Alek glared at the man. We can conclude, Count Volger, that discussing politics while fencing is idiotic.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

The closer he got to succeeding in his presidential campaign, the more Ted Kennedy fumbled.

Given the lives and human suffering at stake, and the internal discord that was ripping the United States apart, it is hard not to conclude that, of all of Richard Nixon's actions in a lifetime of politics, this was the most reprehensible.

Those on the right can do what those on the left talk about," Nixon replied.

Galula had noted that counterinsurgency is only 20 percent military and 80 percent everything else—politics mostly, but also economics, development, and information operations.

Democracy... while it lasts is more bloody than either aristocracy or monarchy. Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There is never a democracy that did not commit suicide.

The fundamental article of my political creed is that despotism, or unlimited sovereignty, or absolute power, is the same in a majority of a popular assembly, an aristocratical council, an oligarchical junto, and a single emperor. Equally arbitrary, cruel, bloody, and in every respect diabolical.

While all other Sciences have advanced, that of Government is at a stand; little better understood; little better practiced now than three or four thousand years ago.

In politics the middle way is none at all.