Andrea Mitchell Quotes

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.

The days when the words 'Hollywood actor' framed Ronald Reagan like bunny fingers as an ID tag and an implied insult seem far-off and quaint: nearly everybody in politics - candidate, consultant, pundit, and Tea Party crowd extra alike - is an actor now, a shameless ham in a hoked-up reality series that never stops.

Concerned we're in a time where politicians can't even fake sincerity. Aren't they supposed to be good at that?

The more you look, the more you see.

A news conference is a device by which the establishment keeps large numbers of reporters from covering the news every place else.

The more you look, the more you will see.

I do not mean to imply that television news deliberately aims to deprive Americans of a coherent, contextual understanding of their world. I mean to say that when news is packaged as entertainment, that is the inevitable result. And in saying that the television news show entertains but does not inform, I am saying something far more serious than that we are being deprived of authentic information. I am saying we are losing our sense of what it means to be well informed.

They say that politics is show business for ugly people, but as I always crack, what would I know about that? I like a challenge

People have curiosity, they have intelligence, they have interest in understanding their peers. But producers and directors of cinema have decided that the seats in the theaters have been made to transform people's minds to lazy minds.

If politics is like show business, then the idea is not to pursue excellence, clarity or honesty but to appear as if you are, which is another matter altogether.

Talking with most people usually involves a search for truth. Talking with congressmen is strictly special effects.

Washington has become our Versailles. We are ruled, entertained, and informed by courtiers -- and the media has evolved into a class of courtiers. The Democrats, like the Republicans, are mostly courtiers. Our pundits and experts, at least those with prominent public platforms, are courtiers. We are captivated by the hollow stagecraft of political theater as we are ruthlessly stripped of power. It is smoke and mirrors, tricks and con games, and the purpose behind it is deception.

I had seen the great, but I had not seen the small.

The twentieth century had dispensed with the formal declaration of war and introduced the fifth column, sabotage, cold war, and war by proxy, but that was only the begining. Summit meetings for disarmament pursued mutual understanding and a balance of power but were also held to learn the strengths and weaknesses of the enemy. The world of the war-or-peace alternative became a world in which war was peace and peace war.

It is my conviction that basic Reality is not all that perplexing. What seems difficult to assimilate are the manifold details of Reality, not its fundamental elements.

The only time you'll see me as a Democrat is when I play Sophia. In the real world I'm a Republican from head to toe.

To understand matters rightly we should understand their details; and as that knowledge is almost infinite, our knowledge is always superficial and imperfect.

During the debate, Palin winked, wrinkled her nose, and gave a shout-out to a third-grade class. Well, you know, that says commander-in-chief to me right there. You betcha!

It takes two things to make a political lie work: a powerful person or institution willing to utter it, and another set of powerful institutions to amplify it.

Sometimes you think certain details are things that only you would notice, so it's a great thing to feel like you're not by yourself and people understand where you're coming from.

Thanks to pathetic reporting by The New York Times and other media sycophants more than 50 years ago, Fidel Castro, following the dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista, was also seen by many as a liberator of Cuba. 'I am not a communist and neither is the revolutionary movement.' Castro said at the time. Only after he consolidated power, did he tell the truth: 'I am a Marxist-Leninist and I will be one until the last day of my life.'

In a sense, knowledge shrinks as wisdom grows, for details are swallowed up in principles. The details for knowledge which are important, will be picked up ad hoc in each avocation of life, but the habit of the active utilization of well-understood principles is the final possession of WISDOM.

My deepest feeling about politicians is that they are dangerous lunatics to be avoided when possible and carefully humored; people, above all, to whom one must never tell the truth.

You can read ten books and finally come across one detail, and it's like, "now everything else makes sense. Now I know where I am."

Public support in the U.S. for the war against Iraq was founded on a multitiered edifice of falsehood and deceit, coordinated by the U.S. government and faithfully amplified by the corporate media.