Joseph A. Califano Jr. Quotes

I was not meant for the job or the spotlight of public office in Washington. Here ruining people is considered a sport … Politics is a blood sport.

I'm not consumed with political machinations.

You don't have to be a political genius to sniff the smell of blood in the water.

Politics is a blood sport.

In my years working in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, I had learned that those who seek the presidency are prepared to stop at almost nothing to get their party’s nomination.

Politics is having one foot in a fire and using the other foot to keep off the people who are trying to push you the rest of the way in.

Lee Atwater [Republican National Committee Chairman] saw politics as a cutthroat game and didn't mind holding the blade.

The fact is that politics in Illinois is a blood sport. It's really rough. It's really nasty.

I have no doubt that the Congress is active in manipulative politics.

Absolutely. I think that this is - politics is a tough business. I describe it as a full contact sport. You have to be prepared to get in there and mix it up.

For Democrats, nothing is any less complex than a 'West Wing' episode.

There's something very Nixonian about the idea of keeping an enemy's list.

Neither political party is clean when it comes to tactics that divide our people.

I think to be in politics you have to have the taste for blood on that.

The political world is a dark place. If you want to portray it accurately, authentically, you've got to turn out the lights from time to time.

You are living in an unreal world when you work there [the White House.]

When you are in the government, you have to demonise your opposition.

I almost laughed about the Machiavellian plans of the presidents of the United States.

I don't play politics.

I'm absolutely fine with the rough and tumble of politics.

I'm not into political gamesmanship.

There's not a self-regulating group of nice fair-playing people in politics. There are a lot of dodgy people in politics.

When Kennedy could not get the civil rights bill passed - and he was the big liberal - Lyndon Johnson came in and it got passed, and he was the conservative and the southerner. So sometimes in politics, to get something done, it takes a special kind of knowledge and a special kind of person, but it doesn't always follow the party lines.

There are conspiracies all over the Senate floor on any day!

If you ignore the murdering and the conniving, Francis Underwood is an effective politician.