Fawn M. Brodie Quotes

Ambition characterizes and distinguishes national officeholders from other kinds of human beings.

Territorial Governors -- are nothing but politicians who go out to the outskirts of countries and suffer the privations there in order to build up stakes and come back as United States Senators.

To be frank, politics is about wanting power, getting it, exercising it, and keeping it.

I think that if politics is just about getting your backside on important seats, then it's a pretty worthless endeavor.

Anyone who gets to the top in politics is a control freak.

Washington can be a very lonely place for Congressman and Senators. Many acquaintances almost all of whom want something and very few friends.

Political ambition, like other kinds of ambition, is a basic human appetite …. Like other human appetites, ambition is not evenly distributed among the population, but enough people with substantial political ambition are naturally drawn to political careers to make the problem of controlling it a major aspect of constitutional government.

I've been really at the highest levels of American political life.

Politicians neither love nor hate. Interest, not sentiment, directs them.

I'm not a political person, and their ambitions are not mine. They want power. I don't want power.

I'm inclined to think that, because it's such an awful life, that politicians do go into it for the best reasons. I mean, some may love the sound of their own voice. But it's such a wearying life, you've got to be impelled by some desire to leave the world a better place than when you came into it.

Politics, as an end in itself, is a poor business to be in.

Washington has political power combined with the insider illusion of being in control.

Men in political life must be ambitious.

When you come down to the short strokes in Washington DC, you have to have power.

If you have sense enough to realize why flies gather around a restaurant, you should be able to appreciate why men run for office.

In politics if the people give you popularity, the other politicians observe and give you power.

It's in the nature of the Presidency that most of the people youy meet want something.

There are a lot of people who go to Washington or go to their state houses with a personal ambition in mind.

Honestly, the egos and the quest and thirst for power is very prevalent in Washington.

I never had a political power base.

People rarely grow in humility once they reach the White House.

I have no political aspiration.

Men in power are always interested in greater power.

You know what kind of person it takes to run for President? Not normal. They could start out okay, but by the time they reach that level they've sold their soul to the devil so many times and stomped the guts out of enough people that they are definitely not like you and me, not even close.