David Greenberg Quotes

Good ideas are the backbone of good government.

You can't run a business or anything else on a theory.

There is no school that teaches you how to run a state. You make mistakes, but you learn on the job.

The statesman wishes to steer, while the politician is satisfied to drift.

The public is going to be looking for examples of immaturity or inexperience or whatever it might be, but I think that's where we have to prove what we're capable of doing from a policy standpoint and from a leadership standpoint.

In politics there's never a magic wand.

Finally, the president added, 'The American people are idealists, but they also want their leaders to be realistic...'

The issues are by some geometric number - 100 or 200 or 500 - times more complicated today than we appreciated them to be when Franklin Roosevelt was around.

Politics is the science of urgencies.

Politics is the art of realizing what there is to realize.

Divorced from ethics, leadership is reduced to management and politics to mere technique.

You have to spend your political capital on great causes for your country.

I think 40 is a good age to run a country. But I've always been fast.

The first requirement of a statesman is that he be dull.

You do the policy, I'll do the politics.

I'm not a professional politician, I'm a problem solver.

A statesman cannot afford to be a moralist.

Forget the consultants, the pundits and the pollsters; good policy is good politics.

Politics is the art of the possible.

Power, in a nutshell, is the ability to get things done, and politics is the ability to decide which things need to be done.

When you see how the President makes political or policy decisions, you see who he is. The essence of the Presidency is decision-making.

Politics doesn't matter, policy does.

When you are President you have to get something done, and that often means compromise.

He can't spend all his time running his mouth; he's got to run the country.

Government is the art of the momentarily feasible, of the least bad attainable, and not of the rationally most desirable.