Quotes About Politics

In Germany the socialists in the Reichstag voted in favor of the war. In Britain the socialists voted in favor of the war. In America the socialists and progressives voted in favor of the war. This didn't make them right-wingers; it made them shockingly bloodthirsty and jingoistic left-wingers. This is just one attribute of the progressives that has been airbrushed from popular history.

Much of the environmental movement is a Trojan Horse for socialist assumptions and ambitions (the British like to call environmentalists "watermelons"—green on the outside, red on the inside).

whenever liberalism goes off the tracks and turns into something bad or despotic, it's because real liberals have abandoned the project. The

That's why liberals are constantly discovering new crises that require more government solutions.

The government cannot love you, and any politics that works on a different assumption is destined for no good. And yet ever since the New Deal, liberals have been unable to shake this fundamental dogma that the state can be the instrument for a politics of meaning that transforms the entire nation into a village.

The more you understand politics, the more you realize that you mustn't move.

Kids don't vote.

She'd gone on the attack against a better-liked rival whose platform more closely mirrored the values of the party's base, creating a boomerang effect on her personal standing. Perhaps

But the idea burned into her mind as much as anything else was that she had lost because she'd hired people who put their own interests above getting her elected. The

And she didn't want the first major address of what could be a history-making campaign to be set against a minimalistic backdrop like some farmer's back porch.

Ultimately, it was a battle between those who believed that it was folly to think Hillary could show up in lower-population areas and change hearts and minds and those who believed, just as firmly, that politics and Hillary's path to victory were fundamentally about doing just that. That elemental split hung over nearly every internal skirmish over strategy and tactics—from

She believed her campaign had failed her—not the other way around—and she wanted "to see who was talking to who, who was leaking to who," said

Clinton's aides didn't know that batches of Podesta's e-mails would be released day after day from October 7 until November 7, the last day before the election. Nor could they have imagined that the intelligence finding of Russian interference in the election would so quickly get drowned out by the combination of the Trump Access Hollywood video and the Podesta e-mails.

There was no room in his kingdom for the princes of the defunct super PAC. Once he'd extracted the group's lists, which he thought had limited value, they were done.

Jonathan Allen

I think it's a terrible system, but money in politics is like water running downhill -- it finds its way.

The only reason the House hasn't done even more damage is that the Senate often sands down the most noxious ideas, making the bills merely bad, not disastrous.

Obama was willing to compromise and Republicans were not. That's not a biased statement. One of my problems with the limitations of journalism is that straightforward descriptions of reality are seen as being biased.

In Warsaw in 1977 he made an unscheduled and highly symbolic visit to the head of Poland's Catholic Church, Cardinal Stefan Wyszynski, and advised Edward Gierek, the first secretary of the Polish Communist Party, to speak more often with the cardinal. "It's never too late" to become a believer, he told Gierek, skillfully exploiting the tension between Gierek's ancestral Catholicism and the atheism of Communist doctrine.

Jim Cannon, Baker's top aide, knew that his boss was "more responsible than he is ambitious." When Cannon advised Baker that voting yes would prevent him from becoming the Republican nominee for president in 1980, the senator snapped, "So be it.

All you need in politics is name recognition, even if the name is shit.

In the future, the churches will focus less on gaining political control of the levers of power and more on subverting power and the systems through which it is exercised, holding the powerful to account and shaping the contexts in which they operate. Drawing on the idea of 'the powers' that lie behind systems, institutions, and governments, the church will involve itself in identifying, examining, and exposing the 'idols' of the political system.

Obviously, political activism means creatively using available tools and material resources, but it should not entail imagining the tools themselves to have intrinsic redemptive values.

The humiliating climbdown, the necessary deception, and stepping over one's pride: they should each have their honoured place in a modern account of the political virtues.