Quotes about "Politics & Government"

Once you touch the biographies of human beings, the notion that political beliefs are logically determined collapses like a pricked balloon. ”

Democracy is fatal for the arts; it leads only to chaos or the achievement of new and lower common denominators of quality. ”

Everyone his own cinematographer. His own stream-of-consciousness e-mail poet. His own nightclub DJ. His own political columnist. His own biographer of his top-10 friends! ”

The reason that last-ditch political maneuvering has become business as usual in Washington is that the actors involved are drunk on blame and are convinced that the voting public is, too. They count on outrage, thereby spreading numbness. They cherish the prospect of partisan fury, thereby inspiring nonpartisan disgust. ”

I'd assumed that a deal was a deal when Princeton admitted me, but I was wrong. The price of getting in - to the university itself, and to the great world it promised to open up - was an endless dunning for nebulous services that weren't included in the initial quote. ”

It pleased the public to think I lived the easy, carefree life - the playboy of golf. ”

Pick somebody who knows what it's like to live on an average income and to deal with the problems that most Americans face. Pick somebody who's traveled this country and who will remember who put him in the White House - not to be a king but to be a public servant. ”

One of the phenomenons of American political life is that it all stops one day. One day, you've got 200 reporters and cameras, and everybody is hanging on you. And three days later, you're alone. And it's quite a transition. ”

Like the Negro League players, I traveled through the segregated south as a young man. Because I was black, I was denied service at many restaurants and could only drink from water fountains marked 'Colored.' When I went to the movies, I would have to sit in the Colored balcony. ”

The most difficult idea to reconcile in war is the notion that anything is going to be solved by killing a stranger, or in risking your life for a cause anchored in some distant political arena. ”