Madonna Ciccone Quotes

What is politics but business?

Politics is the science of urgencies.

So with the end of the Cold War, it became increasingly obvious that there was no basis upon which any decision was being made, not in the White House, and certainly because of that, not in the Congress.

War is regarded as nothing but the continuation of state policy with other means.

Here is my first principle of foreign policy: good government at home.

I believe all universities should at least offer courses in politics and policy implementation.

If your government had given me a thousandth of the sum it spent to depose me, I could have won that war.

War is just one more big government program.

As a governor, I am naturally inclined to focus on the domestic side of protecting the United States.

Managing a country is like managing a company in many ways. It maybe involves more complicated issues, but it's the same skills.

The military don't start wars. Politicians start wars.

Woe to the statesman whose reason for entering a war do not appear so plausible at its end as at its beginning.

Foreign policy involves a good deal of domestic policy.

I did not love politics. As a matter of fact, I hated politics. I loved governing which is … a different thing.

I grew up outside of Washington D.C., a town in which the largest industry is government and in which almost everyone I knew was involved in creating policies which impact people across our country and around the globe.

Military action without politics is like a tree without a root.

The point is that in any country, including the United States, may be in the United States even more often than in any other country, foreign policy is used for internal political struggle.

I mean my life was a combination of fascination with other people, with politics, and with policy, and the impact of government decisions on people's lives and the life of our nation and the life of the world.

I always considered statesmen to be more expendable than soldiers.

For all the sublimity of art, physics, music, mathematics, and other manifestations of human genius, everything depends on the mundane, frustrating, often debased vocation known as politics (and its most exacting subspecialty - statecraft). Because if we don't get politics right, everything else risks extinction.

Some of the same self-certified smart people, who preached about mushroom clouds and weapons of mass destruction, are once again trying to stampede us into war. They seem to think only with their guns. To those who want to shoot first and ask questions later in Iraq, I join in a firm 'No!' We've been there and done that, and America is still paying for their past failure.

I can't possibly put myself in his [Tony Blair's] shoes and be inside his head but what I can say is that the security of the nation is the first duty of any government but at the same time for me going to war would always be the last resort. I would exhaust all other opportunities first.

Government and politics isn't like a reality TV show. It's not about voting the bad guys out of the house. You know, it's about what do we need to take our country or our state or our city forward? And people, frankly, would be well advised to really get back into understanding politics.

I go on the principle that a public debt is a public curse and in a republican government more than in any other.

The [foreign] policy of the United States is modeled on interventionism and aggression. It is logical that we should always be very suspicious.