Molly Ivins Quotes

The politician must always tell people what they want to hear.

This is Capitol Hill where they never let facts get in the way of a good press release.

Every successful president has suffered imputations that he has in sinister fashion charmed the press or used a new medium of communication (radio, television, the Internet) to claim an undeserved standing.

In politics, yesterday's lie is attacked only to flatter today's.

Everyone loves to hate a spin doctor.

Hypocrisy and rhetorical flimflam are standard in politics …

Politicians have always been required to be fake, but now the career havoc wrought by a stray, flying sound bite means they have to sustain their fakeness all the time.

To be sure, administrations since Ronald Reagan had gone out of their way to massage and 'spin' news to the president's advantage, while the media did its best to un-spin it.

What I don't like is talking points.

Almost all political campaigns involve falsity and playacting.

Professional politicians will say anything, and they're always careful to leave themselves room to turn around and do the other.

The media are obsessed with spin doctors and with portraying them as a bad thing, yet seem addicted to our medicine.

Every politician, every president gets votes by getting people that don't like him to like him. That's why politicians are slippery: because they talk out of both sides of their mouth.

I was cranking out that bullshit on Nixon's crime policy before he was elected. And it was bullshit too. And we knew it.

Pete Wilson was never more than the sum total of his focus groups.

We’re going to sell Jack like soap flakes. There are no accidents in politics.

The “cant” of the politician, like the cant of the “religious” man, is also protean in its guise, but its chief method is to explain away words. The politician can always show you that he didn’t mean what he says, but something rather different from what he says. Political cant consists in pretending to agreement with hearers, whoever they may be. This cant is part of the stock-in-trade of every politician, be he Tory, Whig, or Radical, and it is by its means that he tries to haul in stray votes.

Our presidents have been getting to be synthetic monsters, the work of a hundred ghost- writers and press agents so that it is getting harder and harder to discover the line between the man and the institution.

The 1934 Republican response to the Upton Sinclair campaign for California Governor marked a stunning advance in the art of public relations, in which advertising men now believed they could sell or destroy political candidates as they sold one brand of soap and defamed its competitor. In another twenty years, these techniques would spread East, achieve a new refinement, and begin to dominate the politics of the nation.

The age of spin should be over.

We never heard a politician so desperate not to offend conventional elite opinion while pretending to be fearless and forthright.

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.

Books by politicians paint a picture of what they want you to see, not what really happened.

What a contrast, Trump is feisty but flexible. Obama, cool but rigid. But he had no reason to bend. The media already bought into his shtick. His giddy fan base ate up every white-coated lie.

Politicians don't say no to cameras very often.