LEE ATWATER

Perception is reality.

Most of the time I was in grammar school through high school, I was in some kind of rock n' roll band. I would say that at least 80 percent of my energy was involved with whatever band I was involved in.

I think I learned pretty early that in the end, it's only you. To an extent, you're all alone.

My illness has taught me something about the nature of humanity, love, brotherhood and relationships that I never understood, and probably never would have. So, from that standpoint, there is some truth and good in everything.

Just keep stirring the pot, you never know what will come up.

My childhood, adolescence and high school days are unusually important. If there has ever been a time that I developed a uniqueness and sense of humor and the ability to organize, it was then. In those early days, I developed the skills that gave me a certain degree of success in American politics.

Mostly I am sorry for the way I thought of other people. Like a good general, I had treated everyone who wasn't with me as against me.

It took a deadly illness to put me eye to eye with that truth, but it is a truth that the country, caught up in its ruthless ambitions and moral decay, can learn on my dime.

I don't know who will lead us through the '90s, but they must be made to speak to this spiritual vacuum at the heart of American society, this tumor of the soul.

You start out in 1954 by saying, 'Nigger, nigger, nigger.' By 1968 you can't say 'nigger' – that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states' rights, and all that stuff. You're getting so abstract now [that] you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites.

Don’t get in the way when your opponents are destroying themselves.

Bull permeates everything.... American people think politics and politicians are full of baloney.

Any time a political movement shrinks dramatically, very quickly, it is almost impossible to unify.

David Duke is not a Republican. He is a pretender, a charlatan and a political opportunist who is looking for any organization he can find to try to legitimize his views of racial and religious bigotry and intolerance.

Candidates who went into an election with negatives higher than 30 or 40 points just inevitably lost.... Drive up the opposition's negatives.

Every morning at seven o'clock [you] spend an hour and a half figuring out what you are going to do to get on the news that night.

I am used to changing tactics to adapt to the climate.

I'm not the inventor of negative campaigning, but I'm an ardent practitioner.

There's no question about it, from a big picture standpoint, our No. 1 goal must remain reapportionment, because if we allow ourselves to get ruthlessly gerrymandered in reapportionment as we did last time, we can forget any reasonable chance of getting control of the U. S. House of Representatives until well into the next millennium.

Political campaigns are only a slightly more polite form of ground battle.

Politics is people.

Republicans in the South could not win elections by talking about issues. You had to make the case that the other guy, the other candidate, was a bad guy.

I will not respond to allegations made by someone who had been hooked up to jumper cables.

The small things are the big things.

There is constantly a war going on between the two parties for the populist vote. The populist vote is always the swing vote.