Sinclair Lewis Quotes

Politicians are ambitious not to make important decisions but to say important things.

Lunched with Jack Kennedy, the new Senator from Massachusetts. He has the making of a first-class Senator or a first-class fascist.

Mayors make tough decisions; Senators make tough speeches.

Bobby Kennedy is pathetic as a senator.

A figure in Los Angeles politics for five decades, my mother nevertheless had had her fill of talking to people by the time she came home at night.

Rock stars generally don't last in the Senate, starting with John Kennedy. Too much work, too slow, too little juice. Getting something accomplished takes a remarkable amount of tedious work. Rock stars who become senators either run for something else or retire on the job. They certainly don't make a mark.

He is a third rate Western lawyer…they take a fourth rate lecturer, who cannot speak good grammar and whose speeches are illiterate compositions…interlarded with coarse and clumsy jokes.

[Warren] Harding didn't like being a Senator; he liked being in the Senate.

We know that he has, more than any other man, the gift of compressing the largest amount of words into the smallest amount of thought.

Orrin Hatch has a five pound tongue in a four pound head.

Precisely because our political speeches are meant to be reported, they are not worth reporting. Precisely because they are carefully designed to be read, nobody reads them.

A typical vice of American politics — the avoidance of saying anything real on real issues, and the announcement of radical policies with much sound and fury, and at the same time with a cautious accompaniment of weasel phrases each of which sucks the meat out of the preceding statement.

Unlike the current occupant of the White House [George W. Bush], he has no difficulty in orally extemporizing a series of grammatical English sentences, each containing a main verb.

A man’s got to walk if he is going to be in politics.

I'm a man with a great political future behind me.

Many have observed that Elizabeth Edwards could be a political figure in her own right. She has never had an interest in that.

I call him Governor Bush because that's the only political office he's ever held legally in this country. I don't care where they hang his portrait, I don't care how big his library is. To me, he'll always be "Governor Bush." I don't even capitalize his name when I type it anymore.

I have always liked the Kennedys as politicians. They had such great hair.

I love politics, but I wouldn't want to be involved in it. Too little money, too much work! I don't really have the personality for that.

There are politicians who seethe with ambition all the time, and there are a lot of other politicians who don't. I'm in the second category, that's all.

It is essential for politicians to make a connection with us, as Franklin Roosevelt did, as Teddy Roosevelt did, as John F. Kennedy did, as Ronald Reagan did.

Politicians also have no leisure, because they are always aiming at something beyond political life itself, power and glory, or happiness.

I got to be White House chief of staff, ten years of congressman, secretary of defense, vice-president. If you're a political junkie like I obviously am - that was - every one of those was just a tremendous experience. I'm very comfortable with what I did and why I did it and how I did it. And I'll let others judge whether they liked it or not.

I don't have to be in politics.

In the good old days when I was a senator, I was my own man.