Whenever the people are well-informed, they can be trusted with their own government.
I am extraordinarily patient, provided I get my own way in the end.
If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.
It is folly for an eminent man to think of escaping censure, and a weakness to be affected with it. All the illustrious persons of antiquity, and indeed of every age in the world, have passed through this fiery persecution.
A politician needs the ability to foretell what is going to happen tomorrow, next week, next month, and next year. And to have the ability afterwards to explain why it didn't happen.
Leave the matter of religion to the family altar, the church, and the private school, supported entirely by private contributions. Keep the church and state forever separate.
The warning message we sent the Russians was a calculated ambiguity that would be clearly understood.
A President's hardest task is not to do what is right, but to know what is right.
Do you realize the responsibility I carry? I'm the only person standing between Richard Nixon and the White House.
We cannot defend freedom abroad by deserting it at home.
The more you read and observe about this Politics thing, the more you've got to admit that each party is worse than the other.
There are still people in my party who believe in consensus politics. I regard them as Quislings, as traitors... I mean it.
There is hardly a political question in the United States which does not sooner or later turn into a judicial one.
I remember when I first came to Washington. For the first six months you wonder how the hell you ever got here. For the next six months you wonder how the hell the rest of them ever got here.
As societies grow decadent, the language grows decadent, too. Words are used to disguise, not to illuminate, action: you liberate a city by destroying it. Words are to confuse, so that at election time people will solemnly vote against their own interests.
Democracy becomes a government of bullies tempered by editors.
There comes a time when one must take the position that is neither safe nor politic nor popular, but he must do it because conscience tells him it is right.
A politician is like quicksilver: if you try to put your finger on him, you find nothing under it.
If you have sense enough to realize why flies gather around a restaurant, you should be able to appreciate why men run for office.
Political campaigns are designedly made into emotional orgies which endeavor to distract attention from the real issues involved, and they actually paralyze what slight powers of cerebration man can normally muster.
I didn't say I wouldn't go into ghetto areas. I've been in many of them and to some extent I would say this; if you've seen one city slum, you've seen them all.
Americans continue to suffer from a notoriously short attention span. They get mad as hell with reasonable frequency, but quickly return to their families and sitcoms. Meanwhile, the corporate lobbies stay right where they are, outlasting all the populist hysteria.
Growing older, I have lost the need to be political, which means ... the need to be left. I am driven to grudging toleration of the Conservative Party because it is the party of non-politics, of resistance to politics.
You had that action and counteraction which, in the natural and in the political world, from the reciprocal struggle of discordant powers draws out the harmony of the universe.
The disgrace of one's people brings sorrow to the Nobel minded.
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