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People really don’t care if politicians attack each other with untrue stories. They figure if you don’t want to get hurt, you shouldn’t have filed for office. They figure whatever happens to us, our lives will be better than theirs.
BILL CLINTON, speech at Campus Progress National Student Conference, July 13, 2005
Politics, n. A strife of interests masquerading as a contest of principles. The conduct of public affairs for private advantage.
AMBROSE BIERCE, The Devil's Dictionary
The majority is never right. Never, I tell you! That's one of these lies in society that no free and intelligent man can help rebelling against. Who are the people that make up the biggest proportion of the population -- the intelligent ones or the fools?
HENRIK IBSEN, An Enemy of the People
You don’t have to wait till your party’s in power to have an impact on life at home and around the world.
BILL CLINTON, speech at Campus Progress National Student Conference, July 13, 2005
- Plots, true or false, are necessary things,
- To raise up commonwealths and ruin kings.
JOHN DRYDEN, Absalom and Achitophel
Everybody knows politics is a contact sport.
BARACK OBAMA, The New Yorker, May 31, 2004
I never desire to know anything of the detail of political measures, lest even those which I think best should lose anything of their intrinsic value to me, by seeing what low, paltry, personal motives and base machinery and dirty hands have helped to bring them about.
FANNY KEMBLE, Further Records, Feb. 14, 1874
The one thing our Founding Fathers could not foresee -- they were farmers, professional men, businessmen giving of their time and effort to an idea that became a country -- was a nation governed by professional politicians who had an interest in getting re-elected. They probably envisioned a fellow serving a couple of hitches and then eagerly looking forward to getting back to the farm.
In the founding era of our country, it was not organized religion but personal faith that brought focus and unified the early leadership--maybe an unspoken faith in God, and certain values that came with that faith. So in that sense, we cannot discount, in my judgment, religious faith in politics.
BILLY GRAHAM, Newsweek, Aug. 14, 2006
I always believe that ultimately, if people are paying attention, then we get good government and good leadership. And when we get lazy, as a democracy and civically start taking shortcuts, then it results in bad government and politics.
BARACK OBAMA, MSNBC interview, Sep. 25, 2006
The radical invents the views. When he has worn them out the conservative adopts them.
MARK TWAIN, Mark Twain's Notebook
For too long we've been told about "us" and "them." Each and every election we see a new slate of arguments and ads telling us that "they" are the problem, not "us." But there can be no "them" in America. There's only us.
However [political parties] may now and then answer popular ends, they are likely in the course of time and things, to become potent engines, by which cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the power of the people and to usurp for themselves the reins of government, destroying afterwards the very engines which have lifted them to unjust dominion.
It is not the principled partisan, however obnoxious he may seem to his opponents, who degrades our public debate, but the preening, self-styled statesman who elevates compromise to a first principle.
TOM DELAY, CNN, Jun. 9, 2006
I used to say that politics was the second-oldest profession. I have come to know that it bears a gross similarity to the first.
Finality is not the language of politics.
BENJAMIN DISRAELI, speech, Feb. 28, 1859
We’ve come to be consumed by a 24-hour, slash-and-burn, negative ad, bickering, small-minded politics that doesn’t move us forward. Sometimes one side is up and the other side is down. But there’s no sense that they are coming together in a common-sense, practical, nonideological way to solve the problems that we face.
BARACK OBAMA, New York Times, Dec. 11, 2006
Politics is not an end, but a means. It is not a product, but a process. It is the art of government. Like other values it has its counterfeits. So much emphasis has been placed upon the false that the significance of the true has been obscured and politics has come to convey the meaning of crafty and cunning selfishness, instead of candid and sincere service.
CALVIN COOLIDGE, Have Faith in Massachusetts
The only motive that can keep politics pure is the motive of doing good for one's country and its people.
HENRY FORD, "Party Politics," Ford Ideals
When you take a stand out of deep conviction, people know. They may not even agree, but they ask, "Do I want someone who is willing to take a hard stand and someone I can trust to do that when the chips are down?" They want that.
Political language -- and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists -- is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.
GEORGE ORWELL, Politics and the English Language
I mean, you know, this idea that somebody we disagree with on economic or social policy or something we have to turn into some kind of ogre or demon, I think, is a mistake. I mean, it's like telling the American people or half the American people that don't agree with you they're all fools. That's just not true.
BILL CLINTON, interview on Larry King Live, June 1, 2005
I tell you folks, all politics is applesauce.
WILL ROGERS, The Illiterate Digest, 1924
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